An Empty Promise

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, I fit the description: I’m tired just thinking about all the Ec 10 reading I have to do, I’ll be poor if I don’t start eating at Annenberg more, and tonight I’ll huddle over my computer hoping to be free from that history paper that I have to write. But I am from Tokyo, and despite all this, current immigration laws prevent me from acquiring Lawful Permanent Resident status. And Harvard isn’t doing anything to help me.

It used to be that America welcomed the vast crowds who arrived at Ellis Island, given that they didn’t carry any contagious diseases. Today, the process to become an American citizen is so filled by bureaucratic red tape that unless you have an American immediate relative or fiancé, are employed by an American company or are fleeing civil strife from your home country, you have little hope of joining this so-called land of immigrants.

After writing my Harvard application essay about how I was attracted to America by its vibrant politics and hoped to immigrate and run for office one day, I was surprised to discover that it is even more difficult to apply for permanent residency if one comes here as a student. According to an e-mail written to me by Sharon Ladd, the director of the Harvard International Office (HIO), “it probably isn’t a good idea for a freshman to indicate intentions to stay in the U.S. permanently since one of the grounds for denying a F-1 temporary [student] visa is if the consular official determines that the student does not intend to return to his/her country.” Keeping with government policy, the HIO does not help international students obtain visas; in fact, they discourage it.

Hoping to obtain a statement from an immigration official about the rationale behind the policy, I scoured the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services web page for a phone number. There was none. There was also no contact information for their Boston field office, and the only way I could actually talk to someone from there would be to show up between 7 a.m. and 12 p.m., Monday through Friday, and be prepared to wait several hours. Sorry, but I have Spanish section at 10, every day. Eventually obtaining a green card is well worth missing one section, but it seems ridiculous that I would have to wait for hours just to talk to a government representative.

Anne Gardsbane, the HIO’s assistant director, wrote me that although the HIO sponsors “professors and high-level researchers,” they do not offer naturalization assistance to students, and my only option is to hire an attorney. I’ve looked into that, and they go at $200-$300 an hour—a pretty steep fee, given the already pricey tuition which accompanies this world-class university.

Both University and national policy fail to justify why it is so difficult for international students to become permanent legal residents. As graduates with Harvard diplomas, international students are not likely to become burdens on the state. Rather, it is quite likely that we would be able to contribute something to American society as a whole. It should be easier, not harder, for us to permanently become part of this country.

It is equally paradoxical that Harvard won’t do anything to ease the arduous, arbitrary process of naturalization. Why doesn’t the HIO sponsor international students through legal advice and guidance, the way it does for professors and high-level researchers? The College appears to pride itself in its diverse student body. “Our undergraduates come from all over the United States as well as 80 countries and have a rich mix of interests, backgrounds, and talents,” its admissions homepage proclaims. Harvard values the diversity that international students bring to the table—after all, it is exciting to sit in a seminar on Islam with students from Israel, Australia, England and Canada, as I did this fall. But apparently it doesn’t care enough to help these students file for citizenship. All Harvard’s talk of being an international center of learning is just an empty slogan unless it follows through with this simple action. And wouldn’t this diversity be good for the country as a whole if it is beneficial to one of America’s premier academic institutions?

With the current policies of Harvard and the U.S. government, I will be deported back to Japan after four years of soaking up a world-class education. I will never fulfill the very aspirations that I wrote my application essay on—presumably the grounds on which I was admitted to Harvard. Does this seem bizarre to anyone?

Loui Itoh ’07, a Crimson editor, lives in Apley Court.