Business Casual: What U.S. Immigration Changes Mean For International Students

NAVIGATING NEW RULES FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS IN THE US

What a summer storm it’s been for foreign students in the U.S. Recent announcements from the Trump administration regarding stricter rules could dramatically affect international student recruitment and retention.

CHANGES IN DURATION IN STAY

In mid-July, new regulations were proposed that would limit how long foreign students can remain in the U.S. after graduation. Previously, those on F1 and J1 visas enjoyed a duration of status, allowing them to stay as long as they needed to complete their degrees. Now, that privilege is being replaced with stricter timelines. Sameer Khedekar, founder of Vanguard Visa Law, explains:

“The amount of time a student gets to be here hasn’t changed, but the amount of work they have to do… has changed.”

The burden of paperwork and potential bureaucratic hurdles means students will face an uphill battle in maintaining their status.

THE FINANCIAL IMPACT

With the potential introduction of a $100,000 fee for work permits, the cost of studying and working in the U.S. could skyrocket. Sameer notes, “A lot of companies rely heavily on OPT workers because they genuinely cannot find U.S. workers to do the job at the level that these individuals are doing.” This raises questions about the sustainability of international talent in the U.S. job market.

IMPLICATIONS FOR VARIOUS PROGRAMS

The impact of these changes is likely to vary across different educational programs. Caroline Diarte Edwards highlights:

“The four-year limit could be worse for undergraduates and PhD students than for MBA students.”

MBA students typically have pathways through OPT that may alleviate some of the pressure, but the uncertainty surrounding extensions still looms large.

THE NEED FOR GUIDANCE

As the landscape continues to shift, students may find themselves needing legal assistance more than ever before. The complexity of the new regulations could discourage many from pursuing their dreams in the U.S. Samir emphasizes:

“There are lots of great organizations… that help students. Technology could close the gap between needing a lawyer and not needing one.”

FINAL THOUGHTS

The recent changes in immigration policy for international students signal a challenging new era. While pathways to stay and work in the U.S. remain, they come with increased responsibilities and potential costs. Students and educational institutions alike must adapt to these new realities, navigating a maze of regulations and requirements.

For a deeper dive into these important topics, listen to the full episode.

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Pola Lem [00:03.372]

What a summer storm it’s been for foreign students. So new rules on how long they can stay in the US, limiting that quite severely. And now we’re hearing a $100,000 price tag just to work in the US after graduation. So apparently the latter is what the Trump administration is considering for international students. That’s a big number, and if this happens, it could really upend international recruitment for US universities and the companies that depend on global talent.

I’m Pola Lem. With us today are my co-hosts, Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. And I’m very excited to introduce our guest today. That’s Sameer Khedekar, founder and managing attorney at Vanguard Visa Law.

So we’ve started to talk about this already. A quick recap: so in mid-July, the Trump administration said it would implement stricter rules on foreign students, including preventing them from staying in the US for more than four years unless they get permission from the federal government. And before now, foreign students on F-1 visas and J-1 visas were admitted to the US under something called duration of status, which meant they could remain in the country for as long as it took to finish their degrees.

The new rules, though, would put a time limit on that stay. So Sameer, how long do students have to leave after graduation, and how is that different from before?

Sameer Khedekar [01:45.272]

I think what’s important to remember, first of all, thank you so much for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here, and it’s great to be with you all.

What’s important to understand is the amount of time a student gets to be here hasn’t changed. But the amount of work they have to do, the paperwork they have to submit, all the steps they gotta take to stay for the same amount of time changes. They got to do more work. So there’s more room for mistakes, more room for, you know, bureaucratic hiccups and things like that.

Whereas before, with this duration of status process, it was just open-ended. They got to stay here until the school said they’re done. It was easier. Now a student after four years needs to not only get the permission from the school to stay here or get OPT, whatever it is, but they also have to apply to the immigration service for the extension of their permission to be here.

And wait for that paperwork to come in and take all the steps. So the amount of time they have to be here hasn’t changed. It’s kind of what goes into it that’s really changed.

Pola Lem [02:52.192]

More paperwork and presumably more money that they’re having to pay to do all this paperwork, right?

Sameer Khedekar [02:58.414]

Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

Pola Lem [03:01.208]

Yeah. So seemingly the aim of the policy is to restrict the number of foreign students and ultimately, I guess, immigrants to the US. But have students been a significant portion of immigration to the US in recent years?

Sameer Khedekar [03:17.174]

Yeah, I would say, you know, the stated policy from Homeland Security, as they are wont to do kind of across the board, they magnify a small problem as the main problem. And then here are all these rules that we have created almost performatively to cure that problem. So it’s almost a lot of show, basically, is what it is.

The small problem that exists is you do have some students who come to the US and then just hop from school to school, from program to program with the hope of staying here and making a life for themselves, who may or may not have many other options to be here. There are risks for overstaying. And that’s not necessarily a problem in and of itself.

I mean, I think the schools happily admit them, the schools make money off of them. Some of them turn into productive workers in the US. But it’s a small population of a fairly large international student population. Yet it’s made out to be the reason why they reconstructed all these rules.

So that’s pretty much what’s happening. And I do believe, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but there are a significant amount of student visa holders in the US, and we know that a lot of our top schools rely heavily on their presence, their tuition, their innovation in all sorts of different things.

Pola Lem [04:47.662]

Sure. And obviously we’ve been talking about this duration of status change, and there’s also that separate bit of legislation that’s been proposed with the $100,000 price tag for students to continue working in the US. And how likely do you put that change?

Sameer Khedekar [05:11.356]

Well, to be clear, the duration of status rule is effective, right? As of September 15th, it’s happening. And we can kind of get more into what that means, how that affects people.

The second half of what you’re asking, the $100,000 fee on OPT, which is a one-year work permit that follows graduation, that’s a proposal. That’s not a rule. That’s going to have to go through a process.

We think, unless it’s instituted by executive order like the H-1B $100,000 fee, in which case, maybe not. We’ll see what happens. But it’s not a rule, it isn’t effective. And I think they’re testing the waters to see what the reaction’s going to be.

My hope is that they hear enough from the business community that it’s a total disaster. I think a lot of companies rely heavily on OPT workers because a lot of our clients legitimately cannot find US workers to do the job at the level that these individuals are doing.

They’re not, as some of the press likes to latch on to the government talking points, lower-paid labor. And that’s not true from our perspective. They’re getting paid just as much, if not more. Plus the companies have to pay all the legal fees and government fees on top of that. Why would they do that unless they actually couldn’t find anybody to do the work?

Pola Lem [06:38.542]

Hmm. Maybe we could turn to Caroline and Maria. So Caroline, could you tell us why this change already in place, the new rules on duration of status, are significant, and how they look relative to those previous moves that the Trump administration has made in this area? So basically, how bad is it?

Caroline Diarte Edwards [07:04.418]

Well, I think it’s worse for undergraduates and PhD students potentially than MBA students. So four years gives you plenty of time to complete an MBA program. Hopefully, you can complete it within two years.

My question for Sameer relates to OPT. So typically MBA students coming from outside the US can stay on OPT for one year when they graduate, and many MBA programs have got STEM designation, which means that they can stay for up to three years and work in the US. And then during that time, they can apply for an H-1B visa.

And so that is a very important route into the US job market for many international students, and a key reason for international students to come to the US, because many of them are coming from markets where their earning potential is not the same as if they’re able to stay in the US. And so the return on investment calculation really depends on them being able to secure a job here when they graduate.

So could you tell us a bit about that OPT question and how that four-year limitation potentially impacts that?

Sameer Khedekar [08:14.124]

Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So the typical MBA program is two years, right? And so the OPT, for the most part, is a one-year work permit. So the two plus one, the three years, falls within that four-year limit. So it generally, at least for the first year of OPT, as you mentioned, shouldn’t be an issue when it comes to the four-year kind of limitation on initial stay, initial status.

The STEM OPT, so that’s, for those that don’t know, a two-year additional work permit that some get after that first year. And it’s limited to those in STEM majors, and MBA, I’ve seen a lot of this in MBA kind of quantitative majors, right? And these are designated at ICE. The government provides a list of the majors and MBA programs that qualify for STEM OPT.

And then they have to go work for a company that is E-Verified, which is the government’s online employment verification system. So the company has to be enrolled in that system. If those two criteria are met, for the most part, there’s other criteria, but those are the two main ones. Then the student can work for two more years after the first year.

So that’s three years, like you mentioned, which would then take, plus the two years of MBA, five years. So then we have one year that’s one year more than the four-year limitation. So towards the end of that fourth year, we have to see kind of exactly when, maybe six months before, but students should talk to somebody, maybe a lawyer, to help them kind of understand what timelines look like.

They should plan on extending. They have to file an extension. So not only are they applying for the OPT and STEM OPT, before all they would do is apply for the OPT and they’re good. Now they also, in addition to the OPT and STEM OPT, have to apply for an extension of status to USCIS on a different form, paying a different fee with different processing times.

That ostensibly, the application needs to be approved before the expiration date. These applications take several months. If they want to expedite, they have to pay another kind of premium processing, we call it a bribe to USCIS.

Sameer Khedekar [10:29.174]

Of like $3,000 just to expedite the application. So there are a lot of these little complications that just kind of add up that make it a little bit harder. It’s possible. It’s definitely possible to get that extension, but it’s harder.

Maria Wich-Vila [10:43.756]

It just—

Caroline Diarte Edwards [10:44.302]

I’m curious, Sameer, if you can give us any sense for how likely someone is to get that extra year. Would you say that they’ve got a 50-50 chance, or is it a 90% chance, or any estimation of how likely they are to get that third year of OPT?

Sameer Khedekar [11:02.582]

In theory, it shouldn’t be an issue. So the thing with student visa holders is that kind of baked into the rules for them is this requirement that they ultimately have the intent—this is like a decades-old rule that’s really outdated, and that’s a whole separate issue about how outdated everything is in immigration—but there’s this rule that’s baked in, like they have to have the intent to return to their home country once they complete their academic education and their training.

Now, it doesn’t mean they’re not allowed to go and get an H-1B and get a job, but every time they submit an application or make an entry, they may be required to show that. So if they’re applying for an extension of status, they’ll have to probably show in that extension filing, like they do now—that’s what they have to do now if they’re extending their status or changing their status to another status—is ties to their home country.

And that they have a legitimate, enough evidence to show the government that they’re going to go back home. And so everybody is in different situations. So that’s another kind of thing they have to show that could be hard, for some impossible.

And we don’t know to what extent the government really—they have a lot of discretion with that—are they really going to use that as an excuse to deny extensions? Like, that would be legitimately mean, but we can’t put it above this current administration.

On the other hand, the standard practice for USCIS, I think a lot of officers that have been there for years and years and years have tested things a certain way, is to generally approve these with a minimal showing, with a reasonable showing that you have ties to your home country.

So it’s not like there’s going to be wholesale denials, in my opinion. I think the problem is it’s possible to make little mistakes on these applications. And they’re not the easiest applications for laypeople, right? And then if you make a little mistake, a harmless mistake, that can result in a denial.

And then what if you’re denied? It’s like you’d run out of time. You only get one chance after waiting seven months for the application to be approved. So my worry is in little mistakes made by applicants, or even mistakes made by the government. That happens too. And when these little things happen, these bureaucratic kind of hiccups happen—

Sameer Khedekar [13:24.94]

The harm is much greater than the actual hiccup. So that’s what we worry about the most. And I think the administration knows this. That’s why they’re doing this, right? They understand these little requirements make things incrementally harder and scarier for everybody.

Pola Lem [13:44.366]

Mm-hmm. I just have one very quick question. I want to bring in Maria here to see which questions you have for Sameer. But my question on that is whether you’ve got any gauge, Sameer, on how many of these students are getting a lawyer to help them. And you’ve kind of alluded to it already, but if you’re just a layperson, a student, are you able to go it alone on one of these applications realistically?

Sameer Khedekar [14:10.114]

Well, it’s hard to say because right now students don’t have to apply for extensions. So the only time they apply for anything generally is through the OPT process. But their schools have such straightforward instructions, and once again the application process is pretty straightforward, they almost always just go at it on their own with good results.

So it’s hard to say to what extent they’re going to need lawyers. I hope not, because, let’s face it, lawyers are not the cheapest in the world and these are students, right?

So once again, I think another kind of side effect that I believe the government is aware of in terms of the discouraging factor. What I foresee is that there are lots of great organizations and companies, actually, that help students, that come up with technology that could close the gap between having a lawyer and not having one.

We see this technology across the board doing taxes. We see that in starting companies. If it’s a fairly straightforward application, which the extension of status should be, but maybe not straightforward enough for the layperson, but very straightforward for, let’s say, a lawyer, that’s a good opportunity for technology to close the gap.

And so that’s what I would foresee happening, is that there may be some products out there that could be cheaper than lawyers that could really help people, help students.

Pola Lem [15:41.718]

Maria, did you have any questions for Sameer on this?

Maria Wich-Vila [15:45.846]

I do, not about these newer things that are being announced, but in terms of—I don’t know if you’ve seen those ties to homeland as being an initial question, even for getting that first student visa to come over.

Have you seen more rejections in the past year or two, people who in the past would have gotten that student visa approved but who now seem to be getting rejected? One of the reasons that happened about a year ago was they were looking at people’s social media profiles to see if they had ever posted anything that the government found unsavory.

But I’ve heard, kind of completely unscientifically through the grapevine, that the student visas are maybe getting more rejected. There may be more scrutiny being given to those ties to the homeland, be they financial or otherwise. And I’m just wondering what you’ve, if you by any chance, seen or heard anything about this.

Sameer Khedekar [16:39.426]

Yeah, well, it’s important to remember, there’s two different things happening here, right? Even before this new rule, it’s always been the case, and this brings up the question of travel, which now we should talk about, right? Because status in the US is one thing, ability to enter the US is another.

The visa stamp in the passport—we use visa to describe both colloquially—but really, technically, the visa is a stamp in the passport that allows one to enter. And the status is what allows them to stay in the US.

So we have been talking this whole time about status, literally duration of status, that they just have to be here until school’s over. Now they have to extend their status here in the US, which they haven’t had to do before.

But the visa requirement has always been there. And the visas are obtained at the US consulates, embassy consulates abroad, in the applicant’s home country. And that’s where a lot of the denials have been, for the most part. And that’s where these ties to your homeland, that’s where it most often comes up. And that’s going to continue.

And I always say, yes, that’s going to be a problem. It’s also going to be a problem in one’s ability to travel back home. Maybe visas are going to be—right now, many applicants get visas that are valid for several years, right?

And now with the limitation on status here in the US, they might only issue visas for shorter duration, which means they’re going to have to go back and get them extended abroad. And then they may be discouraged from traveling because, first of all, it’s scary to do that. Really scary to do that for everybody, including workers, H-1B workers. The risk of denial is legitimately high, right? And then they may not be able to return.

Once again, talk about discouraging factors, especially for young students. I can’t believe they’re doing this to students. Number one. I picture myself at this age. I’m like, I would have been cooked. I would not have been able to—I was just too immature at that age. I’m not saying these students are. They’re usually much more mature than I ever was at that age. But they’re still kids.

And I just kind of shudder at having them deal with all this stuff.

Sameer Khedekar [19:02.156]

Not being able to travel back home and see your family because you’re scared your visa might be approved—right? That’s a real thing that’s happening now for both students and workers a lot.

Pola Lem [19:13.804]

Yeah, and I’m glad we’re really actually touching on the human toll that this takes on people. And I know, Sameer, you wrote a LinkedIn post about the fact that this is happening and as the partner of a foreign national who’s on an MBA in the US—

Sameer Khedekar [19:34.328]

So to be clear, she’s not a foreign national. She’s a US citizen. She’s a US citizen. But the idea was—yes, sorry to cut you off—but the post was about her. So she’s doing an executive MBA after having gone to law school, right? The law school was a few years ago, several years ago.

But the idea was what this rule prohibits—and she’s a US citizen, born in the US, but she’s the archetype. Like, if you’re somebody, a foreign national, who received, let’s say, an advanced degree in the US, let’s say your master’s, right? Master’s of software engineering or whatever it was, computer science, in the US on a student visa after September 15th, okay, you cannot then go get an MBA on a student visa. You can’t do it.

Because you can’t go from—that’s the other part of this rule—you can’t go from one program to another in the same degree classification, a degree level.

And that was the point of my post. So if she were a foreign national, she would not have been able to do what she’s doing right now. And the point I was trying to make is, who are these people that we want to be able to do things right now? It’s like we want these incredible engineers who have savvy business skills and interests to go get an MBA and start companies and create jobs.

This rule would keep them from doing that because this rule is trying to keep people, to my earlier point, from just staying in the US and going from program to program. The perception is there’s a lot of them and it’s a big problem. When the reality is there’s only a few of them. The bigger population are those that actually are going to start companies, who are going to really do things in our country. And now we’re keeping them from being able to do so. And it makes no sense.

Pola Lem [21:23.262]

Hmm, definitely. I mean, we talk a lot about the whole career pivot and the use of an MBA on this podcast. So I guess, Caroline, we’ve already been talking about what the US risks losing, but, you know, going beyond tuition dollars, what does this mean for business schools? Can you give us an idea of how this change and the proposed $100,000 fee might reshape business education?

Caroline Diarte Edwards [22:03.106]

Yeah, it’s having a really negative impact. I mean, we see it in conversations with candidates who had been thinking about coming to the US, outstanding candidates from around the world who were looking to go to HBS or Stanford GSB, who are just not applying now because there’s too much uncertainty in the process, and it’s a huge loss for the US.

I know that, for example, at Stanford, they’re expecting fewer Mexican students in the fall intake. My husband is a Mexican citizen who did his MBA at Stanford and was on campus recently, and they were talking about the drop in Mexican applications. And so that’s just one example, right?

So if a school like Stanford is seeing a drop, you can imagine how that is playing out across all of the business schools.

And Stanford, of course, is in a very enviable position in having a very deep applicant pool and still probably a reasonably diverse applicant pool, so they can put together a fantastic classroom of students.

But when you reach down further into perhaps the top 20 to 30 schools who wouldn’t necessarily have the same bench of applicants to choose from, they’re going to be very negatively impacted in the diversity of students. And probably we’ll see not only a reduction in the representation of international students on campus, but I think we’re going to see some drops in the classroom sizes, in the size of the cohort that the schools are going to be admitting this fall.

So, yeah, it’s going to have a very bad impact. And that impacts not just, of course, the international students themselves and then the schools in the tuition revenue. It also, of course, impacts the domestic students who learn so much from their international classmates.

The MBA experience is so much about that peer-to-peer learning and that facilitated discussion. And if you don’t have as much exposure to people who’ve worked in very different cultural environments, very different backgrounds, organizations, very different perspectives—

Caroline Diarte Edwards [24:25.250]

Then it just dilutes the experience a bit for everybody. So I think it is a tremendous loss on many fronts.

And I think what we’ve seen in the past is also that—I was looking, for example, at Canada, and they had sought to reduce the number of international students coming into the country. And I think that they were looking at targeting like a 30% reduction, or they had a specific target for the percentage that they wanted to reduce it by.

And then they completely overshot that, right? So that dropped much more than that because people were deterred from applying in the first place. And even programs that were exempt from those caps saw a big reduction in international applications.

Whereas, in reality, those students could have applied and may well have gotten in, and their chance of getting a visa had not actually diminished. But just the negative PR around those changes has such a big deterrent effect.

So it’s very sad that the US continues in this direction, even though it’s quite clear that it does have a negative impact.

And I think perhaps things will change, right? Maybe, as we’ve said, the $100,000 fee may never go through, or it may get implemented and then it’ll be struck down. So actually the reality may not be as bad as we fear it could be.

But the problem is that students have been used to the immigration situation being a constant and not a variable, right? The rules didn’t change very much for many years, and so it was assumed that if you get into a top US MBA program, then you’re going to get a student visa and then you can stay for a year afterwards. And if you go to a STEM-certified program, you can stay for an extra two years.

And that was a very clear structure that was constant over time. And as soon as you start playing with that and threatening it, then you lose that—

Caroline Diarte Edwards [26:50.784]

Reliability, and then that brings risk into the equation. And when you’re investing so much, right? We’re talking about $200,000, $250,000 to go to a top US MBA program. That’s an awful lot to spend if you think that there is a risk that you might not be able to stay in the country when you graduate.

So, yeah, it’s very, very sad all around for the students themselves, for the other students who won’t have those international classmates, for the schools that are going to lose tuition revenue, and then, as Sameer has said, the loss of that tremendous international talent, who will go and enrich the economies of the UK or France or Singapore or India or somewhere else instead.

Pola Lem [27:38.178]

Well said. I think you’ve been the voice of higher education and reason here in saying these things.

We are coming up to time, but Maria, was there anything you wanted to add or any other questions you had for Sameer before we go?

Maria Wich-Vila [27:58.368]

No, I guess I think we’re all just sort of hoping, you know, the Wall Street Journal article said that Jared Kushner somehow helped sway the H-1B decision from last year. And so I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Jared Kushner, please help us, because this is disastrous.

Not just for—you know, most top MBA programs have between, say, 35 to 45% of their students who are international.

Caroline Diarte Edwards [28:15.531]

Victor.

Maria Wich-Vila [28:27.894]

From a short-term tuition dollar perspective. But as we’ve all mentioned, these students who come and then they stay—I mean, we really, up until now, have been attracting the world’s best and brightest.

And those best and brightest have been staying here and starting companies that have really changed the world. I mean, Elon Musk being one of the ones that immediately comes to mind.

So it’s just all—it’s just so shocking to me that we’re in this position. And hopefully, hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

Pola Lem [28:59.278]

Sameer, any final words for us before we close? Any maybe tips for applicants as they’re thinking about these changes or proposed changes and how they should approach all of this?

Sameer Khedekar [29:13.622]

Yeah, I’d encourage all students to understand the rules inside and out. There’ll be plenty of materials, plenty of resources out there. Your schools will help. The schools are great at putting out how-tos and guides.

Look out for companies and organizations that will put information out to support the students. Be very diligent. Cross your T’s, dot all your I’s. The smallest mistake can be catastrophic.

So just make sure that you are double-checking everything and just pay particular attention to your rules and your obligations.

But I do want to say, the rules and kind of what we’ve seen over the past couple of years in immigration, they don’t reflect what a distinct majority of our country feels like. I think polls are pretty clear that a good 65 to 70% of our nation is heavily in favor of talent immigration.

And so what we’re seeing here are the views of a minority. And I strongly believe that these kinds of things, they don’t last forever. It’s just a period of time. It’s a storm that we have to weather. I believe we’ll weather it and we’ll come out stronger for it.

Pola Lem [30:27.362]

Oof, a positive note to which I’ll add: the reputational damage has been done, to Caroline’s point.

But on that note, thank you so much, Sameer, for joining us. And to my co-hosts, Caroline and Maria. Thank you, everyone, for listening, and we will be back again next week with a fresh edition of Business Casual for you.

If you like the podcast, please check us out on our website or on any number of streaming platforms where we are. Thank you so much.

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

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