Victoria Romão Nóbrega's Insider's Perspective on the Return to Classes in America for International Students

With SJC classes starting next week, we’ll all be experiencing the reality of a remote—on-the-ground hybrid college semester very soon. As potentially complicated as that may sound, it’s even more so for international students. Victoria Romão Nóbrega (‘23), an international student from Brazil, gives us her insider take on this very challenging situation.

Studying in another country is, under normal circumstances, a challenge. Think about it: you are leaving your home country, to live in a place that doesn’t speak your language, your family is really far away and you don’t know anyone. In my case, I also had to share my room with two strangers. In the end, those two strangers were some of the best people I’ve met in my freshman year of college.

However,  sophomore year is going to be very different—and even more challenging. The coronavirus pandemic has hit us hard. I don’t think that anyone was prepared for everything that happened. Most of us returned home to be close to our families and to feel safer. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump decided that no foreigners could enter the U.S. in order to help flatten the curve of infection. Five months have passed, almost a million people are dead, and billions of lives have changed. Slowly our lives are returning to as normal as they possibly can, but the international students are now met with another issue: how to return to your college in the US?

First, ICE published a long statement showing all the requirements for international students to keep their status legal. If the college was closed or going fully online, students had to leave the country, otherwise they would be deported; if the college was going “hybrid,” the student was allowed to return to the U.S., but they were allowed to take only 3 credits online. Long story short, they made a million requirements for foreign students to return to the US, but North American students had no requirements to go to any other university in a foreign country. Not very fair, right? Shortly after ICE dropped all these demands, but the president banned all foreign travelers from entering the United States. 

With that, students from all over the globe claimed that students returning to the U.S. are essential travelers, and they needed to return to their colleges. Feeling the pressure, Trump dropped the prohibition of returning to the US for European students, but Latinos were left off from this new rule and are still not allowed to return to the U.S.

Personally that brought me an extra dilemma: I’m from Brazil, and as of August 27th, Brazilians are not allowed to enter the United States if they have been in Brazil for the last 14 days, even if you are a returning student. So now what should we do? Some Brazilian students are flying to other countries, such as Mexico or Canada, staying there for 14 days, only to be able to return to the US; others just don’t have the luxury to do something like that, so they are delaying their graduation, but that can be a deal breaker in the future for them.

This is completely absurd, and xenophobic. When European students claimed that they were going to the United States to study and not for a vacation, it did not take too long for Mr. Trump to declare that they could in fact return to the country to finish their studies. But how about us? We are also going back to the United States to study, a lot of the Brazilian students are investing tons of money to study in a foreign county and are having their studies and dreams crushed by a president that has shown us that he is extremly xenophobic about hispanics (even though a lot of his voters don’t even know what Latin America is, or that Brazil is part of it even though we do not speak Spanish). 

When I decided to study in the United States, I thought I had found my second home, a place where I could follow my dreams, make new friends and finally do everything I’ve always wanted, but now I feel like an undesired guest that is annoyng everyone, like I’m not welcome anymore because I’m contagious. Thankfully, my college has really “opened its arms” to all international students: SJC is leaving the decision up to us whether  to return to the U.S.or not this semester, if we want to take a semester off or have the semester online. So here is my most warm thank you to SJC, that you always care for your international students.

Sitting at my first home, I can’t stop wondering if I made the right choice of going to the United States to study, and I can’t stop wishing that in a not very far future, international students are treated the same as regular students—not just in the U.S. but in every country that we decide to study. And if you are an international student like me: We are together in this and we will keep advocating for our rights, and soon enough, we will be all back in the place we chose to study.