How America shut its doors to the next Nabokov

Five years is a long time. It's more than enough time to write a novel. To become an expert in the Ancient Near East wing of the Met. To train for and complete many marathons. To get a bachelor's degree in the arts, and to find your first post-college job.

But for many international students studying in the United States, five years is not nearly enough time. In fact, it's all the time they'll get.

That's the case for Maliha Ali, who landed in her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, a month ago after living in the U.S. for half a decade. She had come here for school (she earned a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts), and then worked in PR at a New York company up until the very last day of the extension on her student visa. But ultimately, she lost one of the most important lotteries of her life: the one to get an H-1B visa that would allow her to continue to live and work in the United States.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"I was crushed. I loved my work, I was very good at it, and I loved the city. Five years of being in the U.S. also meant I had my people and memories here and that my people and memories from home were far away every day," Ali told me. "I remember when I was being interviewed for this job back in [August 2015], my boss asked me in the end why he should pick me over everybody else who came through. 'Because I'm not from here — I'll pay more attention and this would mean a lot more to me than most people you're talking to.'"

Ali still made it farther than most. Up until the lottery, pretty much everything had gone her way. She got into a good college, secured her student visa, earned her degree, and then got her dream job.

But for thousands and thousands of students who apply to study in the U.S., even getting that far is a challenge. International students have to accomplish the same things U.S. students do — get good grades, put together a knock-out college application (and pay the fees), and secure good SAT scores (and pay that fee, too). Actually paying for college typically ends up being far more of a burden than it is for American students because international students are not eligible for the federal aid that many U.S. students can apply for.

This is all great news for American colleges. In 2014, international students' spending contributed more than $30 billion to the U.S. economy, says the U.S. Department of Commerce. And the number of foreign students is skyrocketing still; almost a million international students are studying in the U.S., says a 2015 Open Doors report. That number is up 73 percent from just a decade ago.

But as soon as a student's degree is finished, unless they can convincingly argue they are an "exceptional talent" and win the H-1B lottery, they are sent back home. And particularly for arts students like Ali, getting an H-1B visa can be a daunting and nearly impossible task.

The H-1B visa was essentially created for international workers with exceptional talent in science, technology, engineering, or math. And it's true, America needs more of these workers. But they aren't the only ones we need.

Workers with arts degrees have value, too. And blocking them from H-1B visas is worrisome, particularly as U.S. schools defund and demphasize the arts and humanities. Here's what society looks like when we devalue the arts:

Our society, government, and university system tell students like Ali that they aren't as valuable as scientists and engineers. That is, quite simply, wrong.

Where would American culture be without Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Hitchcock, Igor Stravinsky, Joni Mitchell, Marcel Duchamp, or Neil Young, all of whom came to the United States to contribute to the artistic community after being born abroad? Foreign-born artists and thinkers bring new ideas into the collaborative artistic gene pool. That is never a bad thing. In fact, immigrants have historically been the life-blood of the movements we've come to understand as our own.

Multi-cultural societies are artistic ones, enriched by the entrance of new ideas and modes of thinking, and promoting the growth of everyone involved. Of course, cultural exchanges also have the benefit of tearing down stereotypes — working with a Mexican artist or experiencing Mexican art, for example, might make you think beyond "taco bowl" when you hear the word "Mexico" in the future.

To take the food metaphor even further: What if the United States only had McDonald's and T.G.I. Fridays? Burgers and fries get boring fast. Most people want to eat a range of foods — Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Ethiopian, Indian, with some Stella Artois on the side (or Japanese whisky, if you're like me). The same is true of any facet of the artistic community — if every book was about 20-somethings living in Brooklyn, then truly no one would read. Give me some Chinua Achebe, please (or heck, even Ayn Rand).

Most governments around the world understand this to some level, as do colleges; it's why (aside from the aforementioned financial benefit) we have "study abroad" programs in the first place. The world is a safer place when artists are crossing borders, as there is heightened empathy and understanding.

But because of the restrictive visa process, some foreign artists aren't even bothering to try to come to the United States at all, meaning Americans might never get to hear the sounds of the Hallé orchestra from Britain, simply because it isn't worthwhile to struggle through U.S. immigration, even just for a quick tour. "Everything is much more difficult," immigration lawyer Palma R. Yanni told The New York Times in 2012. "I didn't think it could get worse than it was after 9/11, but the last couple of years have been terrible. It just seems like you have to fight for everything across the board, even for artists of renown. The standards have not changed, but the agency just keeps narrowing the criteria, raising the bar without notice or comment, reinterpreting things and just making everything more restrictive. We call it the culture of no."

But "America needs more arts and humanities opportunities and there are a lot of kids that aren't from here that will make that conversation much more interesting by the inherent notion that we're all different and that the arts and humanities benefit from that," said Carlos Torres, an Ecuadorian student and visual art and architecture major who graduated in 2014.

Torres, like Ali, wanted to work in the U.S. but eventually ended up back in his native country. He had applied for a federal loan from Ecuador to attend Bennington College in Vermont; like most U.S. students, his primary goal post-graduation was to pay it off. But for Torres and Ali to stay in the place they now considered home, their options were extremely limited. One choice, which Torres pursued, was to spend a period in Optional Practical Training, known as OPT. But that's very tricky. Because the United States puts that emphasis on STEM students over humanities students, international students who majored in science, technology, engineering, or math get 17 to 24 months to do their OPT while arts students are limited to a year.

"It's essentially a one-year work permit," Torres explained. "You apply to this, and in your application you have to convince the U.S. government that what you studied and the kinds of jobs that you want to apply to are 'valid.'"

Now, there is a special option to foreign artists who want to work in the U.S.: obtaining an O-1 visa, a "nonimmigrant visa" that is "for the individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and has been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements." These are exceptionally hard to get — it's how Canada's Justin Bieber can work and live in the U.S., basically.

Clearly, the OPT and O-1 aren't all that viable. Most foreign-born humanities students are thus stuck dealing with the dreaded H-1B.

Not only do you have to pretty much get immediately hired after graduation to work toward your H-1B, you need to get hired by a company that is willing to go to bat for you and deal with the insane labyrinth of paperwork, fees, and immigration lawyers. That's where Ali had hit the jackpot; her firm was willing to fight for her.

But even then, after everything, it comes down to a random roll of the dice.

In 2015, 233,000 international students applied for the H-1B, of which only 85,000 are available every year — and 20,000 of those are reserved for students with master's degrees.

You might still think even 65,000 openings is a lot for foreign students. After all, there are plenty of American-born arts graduates who want jobs, too. And indeed, the argument usually brought against foreign workers is that they are "taking American jobs." But that simply isn't true. "A lot of people have the idea there is a fixed number of jobs," Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, who did a study on just this, told The Wall Street Journal. "It's completely turned around."

Again, this is because collaboration is key. When immigration has been studied among STEM students, for example, researchers found that by adding skilled foreign workers to the job pool, everyone's salaries went up — American workers included. "Because then the pie grows and there are more jobs for other people as well and there's not a zero-sum trade-off between natives and immigrants," Peri said.

Instead of someone in Kansas losing their job to a computer programmer from Kathmandu, bringing in international workers benefited the whole economy. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation concluded that "Congress should raise the H-1B cap to let businesses expand operations in America and to create jobs for Americans. Each highly skilled H-1B employee at a high-tech company supports the jobs of four Americans. The increased demand for workers with complementary skills both raises wages and reduces inequality."

Although most studies have been limited to looking at how this manifests in STEM industries, it is overwhelmingly a truism of the arts, which are typically even more collaborative than something like programming.

As a result, many researchers agree the H-1B visa cap is obscenely overdue for a raise; others go as far as to assert a cap should be done away with all together. "Clusters of highly skilled people can do better together than in isolation," Madeleine Sumption, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told The Wall Street Journal. And no one knows that better than the students studying here.

Yes, in five years you can get a college degree, you can even spend a year at a job. Five years is a long time. But shamefully, it's not nearly long enough.