THE FOREIGN STUDENT

The recent Deak ruing of the Department of Labor, destined to make it impossible for non quota foreign students to de part time work to pay for their education in the United States, is a regulation warranting stern opposition among all who enjoy the privileges of liberal institutions. Destined to take jobs away from roughly 2500 students, thus making them available to Americans, this decree is aimed at a group in our society which if anything, should be encouraged instead of hampered in coming to this country for study.

In the first place, the number of Americans to be helped in this way is limited; and the jobs thus made available for the most part are not full time work positions, but part time jobs which have their figured position in the foreign student's generally limited budget. It is poor unemployment tactics to make changes in individual job holders and not thereby decrease the number of unemployed.

Is the foreign student important enough to academic society to warrant letting him loose among possible jobs to the detriment of the unprotected American citizen? Certainly even those who fell most remotely international cannot gainsay the importance of the leavening influence in international relations of this year by year interchange of students. This influence should surely increase in years to come.

The reason for the recent ruling doubtless did not originate in an aim of the Labor Department to deprive each and every foreign student of income acquired in part time work. The regulation primarily checks persons with little academic purposes in mind, who enroll in a university such as Columbia, for example, with the occult aim of living and working in the United States without coming in under the quota regulation. "These pseudo students deserve the restriction that the Doak ruling is destined to give. The deplorable fact is that a somewhat scattered group of foreign students, some of whom are dependent on their part time earnings to fulfill scholarship obligations, and whose jobs cannot greatly relieve domestic unemployment, are to be deprived of work to help them meet expenses. The foreign students form a group which should be exempt from this type of restriction.