Our Borders Aren't Just Killing Science

In 2006, a senior undergraduate at Duke penned a column for his student newspaper. He lamented how, according to a conversation with an international student, America "has no culture of its own." He complained of the apparent fervor that accompanied the celebration of several Indian and Asian holidays, while holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas were "ignored and forgotten." In his view, cultures throughout history have always appropriated their traditions from other peoples; America must be no different. With the West beset on all sides by multiculturalism, he declared "We must come to the defense of our heritage." His name was Stephen Miller.

Miller is now a senior adviser in the Trump administration. He has architected much of the administration's policies on immigration since early 2025, including setting a quota of 3,000 deportations per day. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and other law enforcement agencies have brought massive enforcement operations to several large metropolitan areas, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. Trump himself has claimed that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country." Still, the government has repeatedly assured us they're only after what they call the most violent offenders.

If Americans in 2025 had hoped our government would spare its scientific and scholarly workforce, that hope evaporated quickly. Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and former Columbia student, was arrested, separated from his pregnant wife, and spent months in detention in Louisiana. He is still fighting his removal order. Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested by six plainclothes officers, apparently for penning an op-ed in the student newspaper condemning the university's handling of pro-Palestinian activism on campus. She was released after several weeks and continued challenging the revocation of her visa; she received her Ph.D. in February 2026 and has since returned to Türkiye. Mohsen Mahdawi, then an undergraduate student at Columbia and green card holder, was arrested during his citizenship interview after Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a memo arguing that he "engaged in threatening rhetoric and intimidation of pro-Israeli bystanders"; he is still fighting deportation.

The government also attempted remove students en masse through terminations of their records in a database maintained by DHS. The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) holds information on students from foreign countries studying in the United States. Without active, valid records, students and professionals on certain visas are at risk of deportation. DHS eventually backed off but threatened to deploy the tactic in the future.

More recently, the government has proposed a massive overhaul to its rules for granting visas to international students. The new rule, published in the Federal Register, places much tighter limits on the duration of stay allowed for certain visas. It makes it much harder to transfer between universities for undergraduates, and it might even make it impossible for graduate students to change the laboratories they work in or their research projects.

The changes and uncertainty from all of these policies are exacting a toll on the people who carry out America's research. Students fear becoming stranded during trips abroad to visit their families. Employers are burdened with mountains of paperwork required to justify their students' work and status at their universities. New graduate enrollment is down more than 20% as of Fall 2025.

It is easy to view the detention and oppression of noncitizen researchers only as an aberration of the Trump administration, or simply part of their anti-intellectual crusade. It is much harder to grapple with the reality that the problems facing these researchers today are natural consequences of the decades-long, bipartisan project that is Homeland Security. Funding for DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has increased almost uniformly under every U.S. president since their inception in 2002. The organization structure, with officers deceptively named "immigration judges," and an entire immigration court system set up under the Department of Justice, gives the Executive Branch vast power over immigration proceedings. It is exactly these structural failings that allows our openly white nationalist government to co-opt it.

The United States immigration system was primed for this moment, and now we are witnessing monstrous changes. We are removing people to countries in which they have never lived. We are de-documenting hundreds of thousands of people living in our communities, leaving them without income and fearing removal and violence. We have filled our country with concentration camps where people are incarcerated, sometimes for over a year. Inside those camps, we are killing them.

Our borders and the violent system constructed to enforce them do not create safety. They create misery and death. If we accept that borders keep us safe, we are accepting that "we" are different from "them." We are immiserating entire generations of people and corralling them in cages. Their blood stains our streets and we look away.

Perhaps some of us imagine that only under a system this cruel can America survive. We might fool ourselves into believing that the richest country in the world cannot possibly afford to extend the label "American" to everyone who wants it. We might even erroneously believe that our comfort and security require turning away migrants at the border and incarcerating and removing many who make it through.

So we curse them with a living death. We sweep them off the streets and out of their homes. We thrust our neighbors, parents, and children into places we pretend don't exist. In those places we refuse to name, we pretend that death makes no sound.

In exchange, we become the living dead. On the surface, our lives remain unchanged. Our work goes uninterrupted; our prosperity is assured. Inside of us, we imagine nothing has changed either. After all, we only silence that part of us that makes no money and does no labor. If we kill the conscience within ourselves, we can still keep our outer lives. The corruption of our moral character saves us from discomfort. At least some part of us is still alive.

It is worse than a Faustian bargain. Even a deal with the devil promises more than comfort and security. We are instead trading our humanity for a mirage. Set your gaze long enough and you can almost see the ghastly afterimage of the human lives we are annihilating. An afterimage, like suffering and death behind impenetrable walls, makes no sound.

That we have built such a machine of undeath is a moral stain on American society. It cannot be reformed. It must be completely destroyed. That work may take a generation, or a century. We must have the courage to face it.

If you, like me, feel overwhelmed entering into a generational battle of this magnitude, I'd suggest starting somewhere simple: say their names.