Decades ago I went to a modest university in the United States.
It wasn’t an Ivy League school but it offered a teaching assistantship and a tuition waiver. My proud mother called all the aunts. My father called travel agents.
I remember being both excited and nervous. It was the first time I, a sheltered Bengali boy, would live far away from home. I barely knew how to boil an egg. My mother later said the enormity only sunk in after the plane doors shut. Later that night she lay awake in bed and told my father “How will he manage all alone so far away?” My father told her “He will grow up.”
The American Dream was about fame, fortune and academic excellence certainly. But for generations of Indians (of privilege) it was also about growing up.
As the US tightens the screws on immigration Indians might need to slowly start figuring out new ways to grow up.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
The Trump administration has launched a two-pronged attack on two pillars that made USA a magnet for people like me - immigration and education. America was a country that prided itself on being built by immigrants.
And it was a country where university meant a ferment of ideas. When I went on the South Asian Radical History Walking Tour of Berkeley I heard the stories of women in saris with paper bags over their heads protesting outside the Indian consulate in San Francisco in 1975 during the dictatorial Emergency in India.
BERKELEY1: We didn't come up with the idea for the masks all by ourselves. We got the idea from Iranian students at Berkeley, and they. Well, they were protesting the Shah.
When the Indian consulate tried to get their names, the university refused to provide them. Today chances are their student visas would have been cancelled.
This is not to say the USA wanted to let in fire-breathing activists. In his book The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad writes the South Asian immigrants post-1965 were “double state selected.” They were the cream of the crop in India and the kind of would-be scientists, engineers and doctors the USA wanted. But they not only got Ph. Ds, they also as, my father put it, grew up.
Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic “Only in America could ‘college’ refer to the amalgamation of a coming-of-age experience and a credentialing service.” That is now being upended.
The Trump administration has suspended visa interviews while it tries to figure out a way to scour social media activity of applicants. Students caught up in any fracas, from political protests to missing classes, can find their visas cancelled. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
RUBIO1: If you come to this country as a student, we expect you to go to class and study and get a degree. If you come here to like, vandalize a library, take over a campus and do all kinds of crazy things, you know, we're going to get rid of these people and we're going to continue to do it.
Rubio thousands of visas have been revoked “but we probably have more to do.” More than one million international students in the USA in the past year contributed nearly $43.8 billion to the US economy according to the Association of International Educators. But Rubio has stated
RUBIO2: No one's entitled to a student visa.
I don’t even remember my US student visa interview. Having secured admission and an assistantship that had felt like a formality. I was more worried about whether I should take a pressure cooker to America.
While the US administration claims its crackdown is on support for organizations like Hamas, the general impression it gives is the old welcome mat is being rolled up. Not that it was every fully welcoming. For example, from 1952 - 1990 US immigration law effectively prohibited gays and lesbians aka “sexual deviates” from entering the country alongside prostitutes, polygamists, paupers, alcoholics, drug addicts, the disabled and those who could not prove “good moral character.”
In a sense America is still trying to determine the litmus test for what constitutes “good moral character” in 2025. India is now the “top sender” of international students to America, with 330,000 studying there currently, bypassing China according to the Open Doors Report 2024. Now Thousands are deleting their social media accounts as we speak.
But no matter where the policy finally settles the wind has shifted. After he reassured my mother that I would “grow up” my father turned over and fell asleep, content, that as he slept, I would be landing in America and stepping into a new life. And I would manage.
Today’s parents cannot afford to be that sanguine anymore.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW