Retaining international students in northeast Ohio: Opportunities and challenges in the 'age of Trump'

Donald Trump's recent restrictive migration regime - symbolized by border walls, Travel Bans, and Hire American policies - presents new concerns for student migrants, the practitioners who advise them, and the institutions that rely on their tuition fees. But a competing migration regime exists at the subnational scale that frames international students, particularly those who study in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and business fields as ideal future citizens. Recent geographical scholarship on the local as a site of contested immigration politics suggests a need to understand student migrants as also enmeshed in the spatial politics of the states and cities in which they reside, as well as the institutions they attend. This article is concerned with international student mobility in the 'age of Trump,' with a focus on the local geographies of exclusion and inclusion this age both instigates and contests. The study findings are based on eighteen in-depth interviews conducted with recent graduates of six northeast-Ohio colleges and universities. Their experiences demonstrate the emergence of new and differentiated everyday landscapes of exclusion, which introduce new obstacles for international students and the local as a scale of inclusionary immigration politics.