The Trump administration’s recent actions pertaining international students, including a pause on student visa interviews in May and June, restrictions on visa issuances from 19 countries and, most recently, a $100,000 fine on H1-B visa applications, have resulted in uncertainty for many Carleton offices as to how their work will proceed. One area of campus that depends on the work of international employees is the Language Center. The Language Center organizes the Language Associate (LA) program, which employs native speakers of foreign languages offered at Carleton to assist students in language learning.
LAs are hired for all modern languages except Hebrew, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, German and Russian. LAs work for one academic year. They assist with language classes and hold tutoring sessions and host events to display the culture of their language and country of origin while simultaneously enrolling in one Carleton academic class per term.
“The meetings with Language Associates are very helpful because you get to talk to someone who is a native speaker and you get to become more knowledgeable about how a native speaker is talking, so you can hear how someone from another country speaks that language,” said Felix Allen ’27, who completed the Spanish language track his sophomore year. “They also host engagement activities with students, which is a time to ask questions about their culture and discuss it with other students in that language. Overall the Language Associates are really valuable.”
Because LAs often come directly from a foreign country, their hiring and onboarding processes involve visa application and issuance, followed by travel to the United States. With the pause on student visa interviews and a slower issuance process, it was unclear at one point as to whether the LAs would arrive on time for classes to start.
“We, as the people who work in various departments in LDC, have been really concerned about some of the visa restrictions on international students that the Trump Administration has been divvying out,” said Language Center Director Amy Hutchinson. “The student visa pause really hit us hard, because that was when many of our Language Associates were getting visas and we had a lot of concern, because we had offered these people the job, but we were wondering: will these people get their visas on time?”
“I think our last Language Associate got their visa in late Aug., and they are supposed to come on Sep. 5, so we were really up against the clock,” said Hutchinson.
Though every LA was able to arrive on time, there was still anxiety about their ability to cooperate with all policies, according to Hutchinson. One cause of stress was an executive order passed in late Aug. that required international students applying for visas to disclose their social media handles to consular officers and to enable public viewership for their accounts. While the policy caused stress amongst the LAs during their visa application process, each prospective employee passed the social media vetting process.
While the French, Spanish, German and Russian departments hire Language Associates independently, the Japanese, Arabic and Chinese departments choose their LAs from the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Associate (FLTA) program. The Trump administration’s threats to end the Fulbright program and funding cuts by hundreds of millions dollars (leading to the resignation of the organization’s entire board) has added an additional level of complexity.
“There was a high level of concern with Fulbright because of a lot of those cuts to Fulbright, there were several job cuts associated with Fulbright. We were worried about those LA positions and whether or not there would be an FLTA program this year,” Hutchinson said. “Fortunately, despite things for FLTAs being slightly behind and the process being a little slower, we were able to hire all of them and we had a lot of candidates to choose from which was kind of a surprise to me.”
Language departments engaged in planning for the worst case scenario, in which Language Associates were not able to arrive on campus or had to arrive late. The planning efforts included alternative programming and curriculum schedules in order to accommodate foreign language student support without a dedicated native speaker to hold office hours and events. Although alternative plans were not necessary this year, Hutchinson insisted that the whirlwind of planning “was not in vain,” as changing immigration policies and uncertainty about the future of the Fulbright program may prevent the Language Associate program from maintaining full employment.
