Nigerian nationals schooling in the United States may be deported if the President Donald Trump administration determines their stay is not in the best interest of the country.
In 2024, the US saw a record rise in foreign students’ enrolment after other choice destinations like enforced biting visa restrictions to curb immigration.
According to a US government report, Nigerians were among the highest enrollees.
In the 2023/2024 academic year, Nigeria ranked seventh globally and first in Africa for international students in the US, with 20,029 Nigerian students enrolled, a 13.5% increase from the previous year.
Speaking during an interview with Fox News, US Vice-President JD Vance said he expects deportation numbers to rise as the Trump-led administration ramps up efforts to remove illegal migrants from the country.
Asked if it would affect foreign students who gained entry into the country legally, he replied in the affirmative.
Vance said: “This is not fundamentally about free speech, and to me, yes, it’s about national security, but it’s also more importantly about who we as an American public decide gets to join our national community.
“And if the secretary of state and the president decide this person shouldn’t be in America, and they have no legal right to stay here, it’s as simple as that.
“I think we’ll certainly see some people who get deported on student visas if we determine that it’s not in the best interest of the United States to have them in our country.
“I don’t know how high that number is going to be, but you’re going to see more people.
“A lot of these foreign students, most of them, pay full freight. So sometimes what you have at elite universities like Columbia or Harvard, you have a well-qualified middle class American kid from the heartland who doesn’t get a spot in these universities because some Chinese oligarch, who is paying $100,000 a year, takes up that spot.
“So it’s not just bad for national security, it’s bad for the American dream for a lot of kids who want to go to a nice university and can’t because their spot was taken by a foreign student. It’s certainly something we are looking at.” (Daily trust)
