The Plight of an International Student: Those who come to the United States to study face an array of obstacles.

• Date: 01 August 2021
• Author: Naar, Scott

It's strange now, living without the fear of being kicked out of the country. This was my situation for so long that it became a sort of routine, biannual anxiety attack.

Every few months for the past decade, I would be wrought with nervousness. I knew that the life I had built here could be uprooted, my aspirations of being a filmmaker might have to be put on hold, and the work I had done establishing myself in the United States could be lost.

As a Jamaican native, I came to the United States at age seventeen to study music in Chicago for my undergraduate degree. From when I stepped out of the airport at O'Hare in 2008 up until I got my green card in 2019, I lived in the United States under the F-1 Student Visa, a legal status that was contingent on me continuing schooling in the United States.

I consider myself a good student and an upstanding citizen. I did my part, obeyed the law, even graduated magna cum laude--twice. But there's one element of schooling that made the threat of leaving the United States and returning to Jamaica real: university tuition, which in my case topped $30,000 a year.

For years, faced with this enormous cost, I heard the same thing over and over again: Get a loan. College is expensive for everyone, U.S. citizens included. Many students do get loans to pay for tuition, then spend decades paying them off.

OK, fine, I thought. I just need to go to Wells Fargo or Sallie Mae and get a loan through those channels. But, as it turns out, that's easier...