International students contribute to Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania

THE GREATER PITTSBURGH region is home to dozens of colleges and universities.

There are the large research facilities like the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. There are public schools like Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Western University. There are private colleges, religious colleges, community colleges. There are medical schools and law schools.

They are a major part of the economy — of the region and the state. That includes tuition, room and board and other fees paid by the students. There are also the paychecks to faculty and staff and the money that flows into surrounding businesses like hospitality and retail. And that doesn’t even take into account the billions of dollars that cycle from research to entrepreneurship to full-blown companies creating their own jobs and economic input.

Students are the heart of all that — including students who come here from other countries.

More than 400,000 student visas are issued to international students every year. Those can last five years. That means at any given time, the United States is the temporary home to about 2 million people who have come here to study in some of the best universities in the world.

A hefty number are in Pennsylvania schools. The impact on native Pennsylvania students is profound. In 2017, the state’s then-Auditor General Eugene De-Pasquale called out Penn State for relying too much on the higher tuition paid by international students.

But now, as legal international students have been the target of some federal deportation efforts over protests, Pennsylvania — and Pittsburgh specifically — must wonder about the impact those arrests or detentions could have.

Carnegie Mellon has been asked to turn over information about international students and work with Chinese researchers. The student body includes 39% international students. What happens if foreign students decide it isn’t worth it to study in Pittsburgh?

Can Penn State afford to have fewer people paying the full freight for a degree? Can the Steel City handle fewer students paying for apartments in Oakland? What happens to the universities’ reputations if there are fewer world-class minds doing groundbreaking research? What about the inventions and innovations that have created companies contributing to the Keystone State?

The rhetoric on immigration issues and crackdowns has been about doing things the right way, meritocracy and contribution. Focus on legal international students is antithetical to that — and ultimately hurts American students and cities like Pittsburgh.