Elon Musk Would Have Been Deported if Trump Were President When He Was an International Student
Or why international students are already the most tracked population in the US.
In the last couple of weeks, I have written a defense for international students and American higher education in response to recent attacks on the sector by the Donald Trump administration. I have gotten some pushback or criticisms that I wanted to address.
This piece combines two of my favorite topics: our terrible housing policies and international students.
I previously covered how Trump was revoking the status of international students for piddling reasons like traffic tickets or annoying social media posts. The good news is that the administration reversed course after a slate of lawsuits and negative attention.
The administration still hasn’t fully clarified these actions. An official did tell the New York Post that the focus of the “special action team” was on “serious” crimes only, rather than on small infractions. However, the claim does not jive with the countless stories of students getting revocations for these very reasons.
Furthermore, Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, released a statement defending the revocations: “There is now a one-strike policy: Catch-And-Revoke. Whenever the government catches non-U.S. citizens breaking our laws, we will take action to revoke their status.”
He added, “This extends to the thousands of foreign students studying in the United States who abuse our hospitality.”
While much of the focus of Rubio’s statement was on students who “have supported terrorists,” the message is clear about covering all crime. We can quibble about the free speech issue, but I will mostly focus on the infraction here.
Namely, Elon Musk allegedly broke the law when he was in the US on a visa, and his story illustrates the difficulties that international students face when trying to survive. I will also highlight how much more tracking we do of international students since he was in school in the 1990s.
Musk’s Cloudy Visa Status
In 1995, Elon Musk was set to enter Stanford University as a graduate student, but ended up not ever taking classes. Instead, he started working for the start-up Zip2, which The Washington Post reports would have been a violation of his student visa.
Musk has disavowed the report, “I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B.” He claims that he had legal status to work in the US at that time. Lawyers who commented on the debate said that it is possible but unlikely that he would have had work authorization.
In a 2012 Hacker Monthly issue, Musk self-authored an essay on his journey and entrepreneurial spirit. He wrote, “I got a deferment at Stanford and thought I’d give the idea a couple of quarters. If it didn't work out, which I thought it probably wouldn't, then I'd go back to school.”
This isn’t how student visas work, neither J-1 nor F-1. International students cannot simply stop going to class and start working, especially before they have even taken a class. There is the Curricular Practical Training (CPT) that allows this kind of work, but not before classes.
My guess is that Musk was able to slip under the rug at that time in the 1990s because the SEVIS system was not operational yet (I’ll explain more below).
Musk Struggled with Housing as an International Student
Let’s take Musk at his word that his visa was legal and sound. I stumbled on another infraction that he himself admitted to in that same essay. Much like a lot of international students, Musk struggled with housing early on in the US.
During the early days of his startup, money was tight. “I had to choose between renting a place to live or an office,” he wrote. “So I rented the office instead because it was cheaper than renting a place to stay. For awhile, I slept on the futon and shouted1 the YMCA on Paige Mullen.”
His story is the iconic romanticized Silicon Valley adventure. Laudable hard work! Doing whatever it takes to make it! He lived the American dream! But it may have been illegal.
There are both state and local restrictions that prohibit dwelling in a space zoned strictly for commercial or business use. San Francisco is especially nasty when it comes to zoning restrictions. Living in that office likely violated various parts of the city’s code
Granted, it is a piddly infraction, one that constantly annoys me about California’s draconian zoning rules. But the US Secretary of State, Musk’s current colleague in the Trump government, does not care. Again, he stated, “Whenever the government catches non-U.S. citizens breaking our laws, we will take action to revoke their status.” A law is a law. An infraction is an infraction. Zoning is zoing.
Even further, Musk likely would not have even been allowed in the country a second time given his financial struggles. Musk said that he had $100,000 in student debt after his undergraduate degree and that he struggled to pay for anything, including housing, at that time in his life.
International students must show financial records that they can support themselves when coming to the US. It doesn’t matter if they have been offered a full ride or not; students can have their application rejected if immigration suspects they will struggle to cover their other expenses, the exact struggles Musk chronicles.
US Government Has Long Tracked International Students
It is not that simple for an international student to come to a US university. There are a bunch of hoops that applicants must follow, such as submitting financial records as mentioned above, and visa interview screenings. Applicants are routinely rejected at this stage, even if accepted by a university.
Universities must also comply with various regulations in order to recruit international students. First, institutions must be Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certified, a distinction that comes from the Department of Homeland Security, to grant student I-20s that start the visa process.
The certification to bring over international students gets pulled all the time for shady universities, especially for-profits. For example, Trump has recently threatened to revoke Harvard’s SEVP certification, meaning the university would be barred from enrolling international students physically (they could still enroll online back from their home country).
Part of the SEVP certification means institutions must have a Designated School Official (DSO) who manages and tracks students throughout their time in the US. Once an international student arrives here, their movements and whereabouts are reported by the DSO through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). This entails addresses, classes and schedule, academic standing, and authorized work.
International students cannot simply do whatever they want once here. They must remain full-time enrollment as measured by course load (roughly 12 credit hours a semester for undergrads, but this may vary depending on the institution and program). If students fall below this, the DSO reports it through SEVIS, signaling to the Department of Homeland Security and immigration services for possible deportation.
This enrollment rule is one reason Musk’s legality has come into question. Although, rules have tightened since he was a student in the 1990s.
This expansive tracking system for higher education partially stems from the 9/11 hijackers being enrolled at flight schools. My own research, though, shows the tracking system has roots further back to at least the Iran Hostage Crisis.
Today, unlike pretty much all other kinds of visa holders, the federal government offloads its immigration work to universities through the DSO and SEVIS. Imagine if in the tourism industry, we forced every hotel to have an immigration officer working there if they wanted to have foreign guests stay.
International Students Were Easy Scapegoats
International students have already long been tracked in the US. Both universities and the students themselves must go through considerable bureaucratic hoops to make it happen. The space is lawful and highly regulated, and not some lawless borderland that some commentators have claimed.
One reason that the Trump administration even targeted international students as they did was because the system was already highly organized and regulated. SEVIS provided them with an easily searchable database that colleges have long collected. Out of over one million international students, Rubio found so few actual cases of serious crime that the special action team lazily tossed in piddling reasons.
Despite the claims that immigration is out of control, the international student sector was the exact opposite. It is not rampant with crime, nor does it have a lack of oversight.
Post-9/11, Musk would have been scrutinized more through SEVP and his DSO. Taking it further, under the Trump administration, Musk would have been wrapped up in Rubio’s international student witch hunt. Either way, he would have flagged through SEVIS data long before he would have been able to found PayPal.
I Am Biased On This Topic
I am biased here. I will be upfront about this. My job as a professor in international education has me working closely with a lot of international students. I am also the incoming chair of the Study Abroad & International Student, and special interest group (SIG) within a broader educational organization.
But more than any of these things, professionally, I was an international student myself. Not just a semester study abroad—though I did do that in Italy as an undergrad; nor just a visiting researcher—though I also did that during my doctoral work in Beijing. Instead, I got my bias straight from the source as a full-degree international student in South Korea (at Yonsei University).
While I was an international student, I saw firsthand how annoying and pedantic immigration rules can be. I guess the statute of limitations is up in Korea (or whatever their version of that is there), but I did work illegally while I was a grad student. I taught, tutored, and edited using my overrated English language skills.
Working under the table as a tutor like this certainly was against the rules. By Rubio’s definition, I had “abused” the “hospitality” of the Koreans and deserved to be deported.
I did do some legal work, too, as an assistant on campus for the international student office. I also got myself elected grad student body president, which came with good funding. Really, I was just cobbling together jobs and gigs to get by while I studied.
Just like Musk breaking some minor zoning rules, or myself editing some papers for cash, I don’t think international students need to be deported for such “crimes.” To do these things isn’t “contemptuously taking advantage of our nation’s generosity.”
This is my bias, but perhaps I could call it empathy from being in the situation myself. Musk may have simply forgotten what it was like—I have not.
Note: For my next post on this issue, I will cover this connection to high-skilled immigration and H-1B visa holders. Look out for that soon.
This seems to be a type for “showered,” which makes sense if he was living in an office that was not zoned for residential.