Section 2: Background – what promises of the Trump campaign have caused these concerns?
Any factual examination must start with a careful examination of those things which have come directly from the source: The Trump Campaign. Here are the cornerstones of the campaign; we can expect these to be driving principles for Trump’s policy in the first hundred days of his presidency.
- Building the Wall: Specifically, building a wall between Mexico and the United States to keep illegal immigrants out, and making Mexico “pay for it”. This has been interpreted by some as a broad move against immigrants of all kinds, and has raised some concerns about reducing the size of the job market for skilled immigrants
- Repealing ObamaCare: The Affordable Health Care Act was a key component of Barack Obama’s campaign, and sought to provide public health insurance to every American. Trump promised to abolish this “failed measure”
- Investigation of Hillary Clinton: Towards the end of the campaign, this divisive piece of rhetoric came to the forefront, with crowds demanding that Trump “lock her up”, primarily for use of a private email server as Secretary of State
- Job Creation in the United States: In addition to its complement, ensuring that jobs currently in the US do not move out of the country
- Making education free for Americans: This has many facets, but the one that most closely impacts students applying for higher education abroad is that which promises to make college education free for US citizens. We have heard concerns that the number of seats available for international students applying abroad might go down
- Eradication of ISIS: This is a point centric on national security – Trump has promised to take out the largest terrorist organization active in the world today; the concern here is that the increased defence spending as a result of this might drive down the higher education budget, and impact the number of seats available to international students
All these are largely populist points, rather than being deep policy strategic fronts. In the forthcoming section, we examine the concerns rising out of each of these, and prove that the vast majority of them have no impact on college admissions, or on job security post college, for international students.