Middle East Studies Association
MESA Joint Statement of the Board, Task Force on Civil and Human Rights and Committee on Academic Freedom concerning 2025 Travel Bans
We write to observe up on our June 16 Advisory regarding the newest iteration of the Trump administration’s journey bans, which have been first introduced on June 4, 2025. Since that point, the federal government has imposed an additional travel ban on these touring on a Palestinian Authority passport and all individuals making use of for customer visas from Gaza. As we wrote in our earlier advisory, we decry and condemn within the strongest doable phrases these measures, which use nationwide origin as a free proxy for race and faith, and advance discriminatory objectives in limiting journey to the U.S. We’re notably dismayed on the gratuitous cruelty with which the federal government has canceled visas for medical evacuees from Gaza, together with Palestinian youngsters scheduled to journey to america for reconstructive surgeries to deal with catastrophic accidents they’ve sustained as a consequence of Israeli assaults.
We famous in June that MESA was exploring choices to pursue a authorized problem towards these new journey bans, as we did against the 2017 Muslim Travel Ban. As a result of 2018 U.S. Supreme Court docket opinion in Trump v. Hawaii that upheld the 2017 journey ban, we’ve got decided for the second that there isn’t any clear path for litigation, primarily based on conversations with companion organizations centered on civil rights and immigrants’ rights. We proceed to consider that the Supreme Court docket determination in that case was profoundly misguided, distorting constitutional protections towards racial and non secular discrimination—permitting the administration to impose arbitrary restrictions, unfairly concentrating on Muslim and Center Jap communities, by pretextually invoking “nationwide safety.” Just like the 2017 Muslim Journey Ban, so too the journey bans imposed in 2025 hurt our members by disrupting journey, analysis, scholarship, academic alternatives, and the free alternate of concepts with these primarily based within the nations straight affected by the ban.
The journey bans have upended purposes for admission to U.S. universities on the undergraduate and graduate ranges from affected nations. They’ve additionally had an opposed impact on the persevering with training of worldwide college students already enrolled in U.S. diploma applications who traveled exterior of the U.S. over the summer season. Within the final educational yr, the State Division reportedly issued over 5,700 F-1 and J-1 visas to overseas college students and researchers from nations now affected by the journey ban. Of those, greater than half have been visas issued to residents of Iran and Myanmar. The lack of a considerable variety of Iranian college students and students, now barred from research and analysis within the U.S., is keenly felt by MESA members.
Past the journey bans, the summer season introduced extra unwelcome information when the Trump administration directed all consulates to droop pupil visa processing whereas introducing new standards for vetting applications based on social media usage. Hundreds of scholars have been left in limbo, with those that had secured visa interviews discovering their appointments canceled. Even after visa processing resumed, backlogs and gradual operations have left untold numbers of worldwide college students admitted to schools and universities within the U.S. unable to acquire visas in time for the beginning of the tutorial yr. For a further cohort of scholars, the continuing immigration crackdowns within the U.S. and the revocation of some college students’ visas final yr have led to second thoughts about American greater training. The predictable consequence has been substantial declines in worldwide pupil enrollments throughout the U.S. in the beginning of this educational yr.
Total, the journey bans issued by the Trump administration this yr are focused on the Center East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, and within the case of the MENA area the six nations straight impacted account for nearly half the inhabitants of the area. Furthermore, as a result of the MENA area and the Muslim world are disproportionately focused by journey restrictions, the bans themselves and their political repercussions have harmed research, analysis, and scholarship in our area by impeding scholarly exchanges and exacerbating tensions that make entry to area websites and archives that rather more tough.
MESA stays dedicated to preserving our collegial and educational networks with college students and students now excluded from the U.S. We acknowledge that the residents of nations and areas affected by these journey restrictions have in lots of circumstances already suffered huge violence and dispossession as a consequence of U.S. insurance policies, together with monetary and army help to belligerents throughout a spread of conflicts within the MENA area in addition to the Trump administration’s ongoing help for Israel’s genocide towards Palestinians in Gaza.
The Center East research educational neighborhood has each an expert and an moral accountability to defend the rights of our college students and colleagues who are actually being harmed by arbitrary and discriminatory bans on their journey. We’ll proceed to discover all avenues to help affected college students and colleagues, together with by voicing our opposition to those bans, documenting their opposed impression on our scholarly networks, and creating revolutionary means of continuous scholarly exchanges with affected communities. We’re at the moment within the planning section to convene a digital analysis workshop in 2026 utilizing on-line platforms to keep up our transnational scholarly networks. We hope all MESA members will be part of us on this experiment in digital gathering, whereas we proceed to work to see these journey bans reversed and our mental neighborhood restored.
