White House immigration policies are interfering with Monterey County’s higher learning.

Lama Ranjous was coming of age in Damascus just as Syria was thrumming with the possibility of change. She left her hometown of Hama, about three hours from Damascus, to live in the city and study political science, and just after she graduated college in 2010, the Arab Spring began to deliver hope of democracy, but also rocked the region with violence.

Ranjous, interested in development work to improve conditions in poor and rural parts of Syria, went on to work for NGOs. But opportunities for change soured as the Syrian civil war raged on. While it still felt far away from her own life, Ranjous' work altered. Instead of doing development projects like improving infrastructure in rural villages, she was helping with urgent first-aid projects for displaced people. Schools were converted to shelters as neighborhoods were bombed out.

During a 10-day visit to her hometown during the summer of 2012, violence erupted in Damascus after a suicide bomber killed three military leaders.

On the way back to Damascus, Ranjous looked out the windows of the bus and saw a different place than the one she'd left.

"The government went crazy, and the people went crazy too," she says. "It was too much. I came back after 10 days to find everything changed – literally everything – changed in the city. All the buildings were flattened. I cannot forget this day."

There were the practical changes (the bus ride home after that day went from being a three-hour trip to five hours, because of new checkpoints) and adjustments (her parents worried more than they had when she left years earlier for college).

And there was a new direction for Ranjous, now 28. "There is a certain rule inside international NGOs that if you don't get international experience, you cannot get higher up. I thought, this is the time," she says. But still, it took her some time to make a tough decision to leave her family behind for two years: "because you should prepare your family, feel like they are safe, that they will never face any problem they cannot fix alone."

She applied to graduate schools in the U.K. and the U.S., and moved to Monterey and enrolled at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies last August, supported by financial aid, to study international policy and development.

"From that point, everything is just opening the doors in front of me," she says. "Everything went really smoothly."

But then American politics began to change. Despite assurances from everywhere she turned – new friends, her Monterey landlord, the news – that Donald Trump would not win the presidential election, he did.

Then came Trump's Jan. 27 executive order, just as Ranjous was beginning her second semester. It was titled "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States." Syrian refugees were banned indefinitely, according to Trump's order: "I hereby proclaim that the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States."

Ranjous was angry, and nervous. "You just feel like you are not safe anymore," she says. "Because you are Syrian, you are a Muslim, and you are a woman. It was three in one."

Ranjous wasn't the only person who felt fearful. The changing immigration situation for the U.S. means institutions in Japan and China are second-guessing study-abroad programs with MIIS and CSU Monterey Bay this year. It means potential challenges for recruiting Arabic instructors to the Army's Defense Language Institute in Monterey.

It's not just Monterey County's agriculture and hospitality workforce, heavily reliant on immigrants, that are potentially threatened by the Trump administration's policies on immigration. The White House's direction is also threatening institutions of higher education, another major economic engine of the region. Officials at Hartnell Community College, the Middlebury Institute and CSUMB all see different kinds of challenges ahead for their students, faculty and their ability to fulfill their missions as institutions of advanced learning.

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When the Sept. 11 attacks happened, Ida Mansourian was managing international programs for the Maricopa Community College system in Arizona. She was working with about 100 Middle Eastern students one week. The next, there were just two.

"The Gulf countries chartered airplanes and gathered their students," she recalls. "It taught me, and those of us in higher ed for a long time, to try to diversify your student body so you do not rely on one culture and one region."

Mansourian is a native of Iran, and came to the U.S. in 1987 to study architecture at Arizona State University, then ended up returning to school for a master's degree in education and has worked in international college programs for the past 23 years.

Now, as executive director of international programs at CSUMB, Mansourian knows the effects of immigration policy changes and Trump's travel bans – though they've been blocked by courts – are not just conceptual.

For the past two years, about 50 students came from China to study at CSUMB for the summer. This year, they're not coming back. "I was just informed they are sending students to a European partner, because they don't know whether their visas will get denied, or they have other things happen," Mansourian says. "Right after the election, and the travel bans, I have received many emails raising concerns and questions: Can their students be safe if they send them?"

Of 250 higher ed institutions surveyed by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, 39 percent reported a decrease in international applications for the fall 2017 semester, according to a March 13 report. The most frequently cited concerns, the report states, are a perceived increase in visa denials; concerns the executive order banning travel could expand to include more countries; and the "perception that the climate in the U.S. is now less welcoming to individuals from other countries."

Mansourian is starting to see the same thing anecdotally, and she identifies with the cautionary approach, based not just on immigration policy but other uniquely American attributes, like gun culture.

"In many instances, individuals make a different plan; they are going to Australia or Canada," she says. "If as a parent, I see my black-haired, dark-eyed child is going to have difficulty being confused as Iranian and is going to get beaten up or shot… It could be a combination of many things."

Similar questions have surfaced at MIIS, where a Japanese university sent a letter about fear of continuing to send students to study in the U.S.

"Japanese people are never going to be caught in the net," says Jeff Dayton-Johnson, the vice president for academic affairs and dean of MIIS. But he talks about "the theme of anxiety" as a recurring feeling these days on an international campus where students come from 64 countries – five of them from three countries listed on Trump's first travel order, which was issued over winter break, when administrators first worried students might be away and unable to return to campus. Those students were all in the U.S. at the time, two days before the spring semester started, but the worry didn't go away entirely.

"The students here feel very, very anxious," Dayton-Johnson says. "Not just the five students in question, but also students from Afghanistan, Pakistan. Is the list going to be expanded? For me this is not an abstract, new state of legal principles we have to learn to implement. It is actually associated with individuals we know."

There's a personal dimension to limiting travel, he says, but it goes deeper: There's a potential decrease in the number of full tuition-paying students, and a more academic and intellectual affront.

"In this country, over the last 40 years, the student body has become so internationalized," Dayton-Johnson says. "There's a business risk that we as institutions have come to depend on students from around the world. More importantly, there's a risk to our mission, because we've come to depend on a diverse, international student body.

"This cuts to the very heart of what we stand for as an institution."

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Before Ida Mansourian started her job at CSUMB in May of 2014, there were just two employees dedicated to international programs. Today, Mansourian oversees a staff of eight, and is just a few months from completing a two-year process of writing a plan for internationalization at CSUMB – something the university could do only with an invitation from the American Council on Education, which is serving as a consultant on the plan.

In 2012, CSUMB had just 59 international students. For the fall semester of 2017, Mansourian expects more than 700.

But still, she considers that small.

"For what California does, it's not large. CSUMB should be in a much better position, so we are trying to catch up."

But that effort might face new challenges because of what's happening in the White House – and American culture, particularly its relatively open gun laws, Mansourian observes. "Obviously the restrictions on visas might create some obstacles," she says. "Recruiting agencies have apprehension."

It's apprehension that's been widely discussed when it comes to Monterey County's two largest industries, agriculture and hospitality, respectively. Both rely heavily on immigrant workforces, and ag industry leaders acknowledge that some 70 percent of their workers are likely undocumented, mostly from Mexico.

But higher ed matters too, not just in its intellectual capacity: Education is the third-largest industry in Monterey County, and the fourth-largest employer (government is larger). It's a $2 billion industry with more than 16,100 jobs, including both K-12 and higher ed.

"It's huge," says David Spaur, Monterey County's director of economic development. "You have a lot of payroll in education. It's a major industry for Monterey County."

There are 12 institutions of higher learning and research: MIIS, CSUMB, Hartnell and Monterey Peninsula community colleges, the Army's Defense Language Institute, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey College of Law, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (affiliated with San Jose State), Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, the Naval Research Laboratory Marine Meteorology Division, University of California's Hastings biological field station in Carmel Valley and UC Cooperative Extension's agricultural research station in Salinas.

They're working on unique missions, but ironically, a few stand out as leaders in precisely the area's Trump's travel ban aims to address. NPS and MIIS are training the counterterrorism experts of tomorrow, including foreign students like Ranjous, from Syria, or Jordanian King Al Abdullah II, an NPS alum. NPS hosts an average international student population of 207 representing 44 nations, about 13 percent of its student body.

"We work with partners from our other countries in just about everything we do," says Capt. Al Scott, director of the International Graduate Programs Office at NPS. (For more on NPS' newest cohort from Mali, see story, p. 14.)

And DLI is training young members of the military in foreign languages, many of whom will go on to serve in American embassies abroad.

"There is nothing good to say about the travel ban," says Dino Pick, who served from 2010-14 as commandant at DLI. (Current Commandant Phillip Deppert declined to be interviewed for this story.) "It has the exact opposite effect to that which it is trying to advance, potentially harming our ability to hire Arabic instructors and over time, having a harmful effect on national security."

Pick's thinking goes like this: DLI hires almost all American citizens as language instructors, and roughly 4 percent on H-1B visas. (An immigration attorney on staff helps with those visa applications.) He sees potential recruitment challenges for teachers of some languages.

About 3 percent of DLI students are foreign area officers, who work in embassies or combatant commands, and roughly 90 percent are enlisted in the military and mostly work in the intelligence community. That's where Pick sees another, more abstract, challenge when it comes to U.S. immigration policy and training that supports those policies.

"We are not even asking the right questions about immigration," Pick says. "Who should be entering this country and how can we facilitate that?

"When you come to a U.S. Embassy and apply for a visa it can be a humiliating experience. You stand in a line outside, with layers of security, which is invasive and, depending on your culture, offensive," he says, describing his own assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Jordan.

"Then finally, you talk to someone at a consular window behind 4 inches of bulletproof glass. And all the incentive is for that person is to say ‘No.'" That's because, Pick says, the junior embassy staffer doesn't want to risk approving papers for someone who might go on to do harm.

The immersive language instruction at DLI – which Pick himself experienced as a student of Arabic from 1996-97, before being assigned to Kuwait – is a first key step in improving cross-cultural understanding, he adds.

MIIS focuses on global study, and requires all students to study a second language. The school specializes in programs like translation and interpretation and nonproliferation – precisely the types of programs that, if successfully executed, could stem the refugee crisis that prompted Trump to sign his executive order to begin with.

"What we're trying to do is directly reduce, diminish, defuse the causes of refugee outflows," Dayton-Johnson says.

The 12 local institutions, some of which share a focus on internationalization and foreign language, is part of what Spaur sees as the value of higher ed, beyond intellectual capital.

"We're the language capital of the world," Spaur adds. "We're branded and trademarked as that. What Trump wants to do is close the borders because he thinks it's a strategic safety issue. It's contrary: We need to train more people and have more people flow internationally." Spaur is talking in part about national security, but he's mostly talking about his area of expertise – creating a vigorous local economy: "It's a strategic imperative for Monterey County."

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When Lama Ranjous first arrived to the U.S. last summer, she knew nobody. Through webinars, she'd met a climate change activist living in San Rafael; the woman drove down from San Rafael to meet Ranjous at Plume's for coffee.

She talked to Ranjous about navigating culture shock, mostly around dating. "In Syria, we are very direct. It's very different, and it's not that complicated," Ranjous says.

They also talked about American politics. Ranjous' new friend was supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders for president, and told her Trump had no chance.

Ranjous was still adapting to the culture and overcoming her nervousness around doing homework in English and speaking English, while watching bad news about the war back home when the election result shook her even more.

"You face this kind of trauma inside your head," she says. "I was losing sleep, I had a lot of nightmares. I thought I should talk to my family every day, check on them. It was really difficult for me at that time."

It got easier, but there were still challenges. In January, Ranjous was preparing to attend a conference in New York, and worried her Syrian passport would mean she couldn't get on the plane. Her friend from San Rafael returned to town, and gave her a small copy of the Constitution, wrapped in an American flag. (There were no travel problems. Since it was a domestic flight, Ranjous wasn't even asked to show a passport.)

Her plan is still to return to Damascus, where she wants to work on large-scale institutional changes, rather than one development project at a time. Although she will return to a war-torn country that has likely become unrecognizable in many ways, it's still home.

"The first stories of my life were there," Ranjous says. "The first job, the first keys for my apartment, the first love story. It's this attachment. Even if the city hurt you a lot, you cannot just break this attachment. There are a lot of memories."

For her, that's the norm: travel abroad to study – not as part of a long-term immigration plan, but to develop new skills then bring them back home.

"There are a lot of people who were forced outside the country because of safety," she says. "I don't think anyone in a normal situation wants to leave his country or his home. If you lost everything, what would you do?"

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Hartnell Community College also has a large international population: Some 800 undocumented immigrant students are currently enrolled there, or 5 percent of the population.

"They are high-achieving students," says Bronwyn Moreno, director of student affairs at Hartnell. "We don't have data on exactly why that is, but we could make a hypothesis: They don't take education for granted. They are there because they're fighters. These are highly motivated, skilled students."

The majority of undocumented students at Hartnell are Mexican, but there are also students from the Philippines, South Korea, Europe, the Middle East.

Since Election Day, Moreno says those students, known as "dreamers," have been fearful: "It almost felt like psychological warfare."

Part of that is because of how easily one president can undo another's executive orders. Barack Obama signed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, allowing certain undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors – known as "dreamers" – to qualify for work permits and be protected from deportation.

Using a $15,000 grant from the California Endowment, Hartnell is pushing hard to get dreamer students to renew their DACA status, hosting know-your-rights workshops and paying half of the $495 application fee to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

To Moreno, it's part of Hartnell fulfilling its mission: "It's important to send a very clear, and loud message to students that we embrace diversity. That's always been part of higher education: diversity of thought, diversity of experiences."

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On the campaign trail last year, Jimmy Panetta pledged to work on comprehensive immigration reform if he was elected to Congress. He envisioned Hillary Clinton helping from the White House, and himself stepping up to lead on a controversial issue with bipartisan support.

Instead, Panetta is picking up the pieces of what's left of a broken immigration system, and finding bipartisan partnership where he can.

For instance, Panetta is a co-sponsor, along with dozens of other lawmakers, of the Bridge Act. It would extend provisions of Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order for up to three years at a time, in the event Trump repeals DACA, though Panetta is betting against that: "Right now, from what I've seen and what I've heard, I would be surprised if Donald Trump revoked that and actually pulled President Obama's executive order when it comes to DACA," Panetta says. "He has made statements alluding to the fact that he actually has sympathy.

"However: If he does, that's why the House and Senate are working on the Bridge Act."

To sign on, a member of either party was required to also guarantee the signature of a member of another party. In Panetta's case, he approached Rep. John Faso, R-New York, who agreed to sign on. This novel, bipartisan approach has Panetta hopeful there will be a chance to really work on immigration.

After courts blocked implementation of Trump's Jan. 27 executive order, he signed a second, slightly more restrained, version of the travel ban on March 6.

A federal judge in Hawaii issued an injunction on the grounds that it discriminated against Muslims, blocking core parts of that second travel ban as well.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed an appeal on March 30 in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

For now, the injunction remains in effect. But Panetta says it might be too late for that to work as a remedy.

"Any time where there is an executive order that may deter people from coming to this country, I think harm is done," Panetta says. "Even though these orders were halted by the courts and we're seeing our checks and balances being exercised, you can't quantify this fear we're seeing right now."