By: Kobena Amoah ‘23
It is the middle of Spring Break and it has become increasingly obvious that we are in the middle of a crisis. School closures have become the normative standard in dealing with the pandemic. I check my email and dial phone numbers often in a frantic search of a solution to what has become a desperate situation. A friend of mine calls, informing me of his school’s decision to evict everyone from campus. There is a long pause. My phone hits the ground as my knees buckle knowing this is the fate of millions of students around the country. They’re being evicted without being served any prior notice and for international students, this decision has left them stranded feeling unworthy of help.
The home is often said to be the center of life. For international students, the dorm has come to embody a synonymous identification with the home. The dorm represented a place of refuge from the hard day’s grind of work and academic responsibilities. It represented a protective shell, a place where they could retreat, form quiet habits, and learn about the traditions of the foreign land that they find themselves on. Now, the current situation has made obvious the impermanence of this attachment. College housing used to represent respite for students from their international borders. Now, evictions from college housing have made it evident that the international student housing crisis is just a fraction of the bigger student housing issue.
Particularly, I am concerned about the immensity of the consequences for the international students stuck within American borders. For these students, the bigger concern of their eviction is that it forces them into a long and stressful relocation process. The search for immediate temporary residences requires international students to try to afford rentals in the current economic climate. However, the issue of affordability pales in comparison to the broader issue of security.
It is hard to overstate the sense of security living on campus provides international students. This sense of security, however, is not tied to a college’s administration of justice but rather tied to the stability that the college environment provides. And in this crisis period, it is the maintenance of this stability that should matter most. At Lake Forest College, I was part of a lucky few to have been granted permission to stay on campus, but I know all too well how close I was to losing my sense of safety and security that living on campus provides.
I have gone looking for answers about why student evictions have become the go-to method for many colleges to battle the pandemic. Quite honestly, I have found there to be no tangible reasons as to why schools have resorted to this method. The bigger concern here is not about the prominence of student eviction. It is about the consequences. If colleges are so bent on preventing localized virus outbreaks, what other dangers are they making their student populations more susceptible to?
I believe all this suffering is unnecessary and shameful. For international students who came here in the hopes of bettering themselves and their communities in pursuit of the infamous American dream, the eviction process has only served to erase this dream. Or, at the very least, has caused them to temporarily shelve their dreams. In a much broader context, this problem is not particular to international students. There is an ongoing student housing crisis and it’s high time colleges put it to the top of their agenda.
