How both parties shaped immigration — and international students — for decades
Almost everything you depend on — your visa category, your work authorization, the database your DSO updates, the fee you paid before you ever got here — was built by someone. Usually decades ago. Often by the party you’d least expect.
I went looking for who actually made these decisions. The record doesn’t sort cleanly.
This isn’t an argument that every administration is the same, because they aren’t, and the pace right now is genuinely different.
It’s a narrower point: neither party has a clean record here, and the rules have moved in both directions under both.
The F-1 visa for international students and the right to work after graduation
Before OPT had a name, it had a rule. And it’s been rewritten by nearly every administration since.
Year | What happened | President | Party |
1947 | First practical training rule — students could work up to 18 months after coursework | Truman | D |
1952 | Immigration and Nationality Act creates the F-1 student category | Truman | D |
1992 | Modern OPT and CPT created by regulation, July 20 | G.H.W. Bush | R |
2008 | 17-month STEM OPT extension created | G.W. Bush | R |
2016 | Replaced with the current 24-month STEM OPT extension | Obama | D |
2022 | 22 new fields added to STEM OPT eligibility | Biden | D |
Start with 1952, because the story of how F-1 came to exist is stranger than you’d expect.
The Immigration and Nationality Act was written by two Democrats — Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada and Representative Francis Walter of Pennsylvania.
Harry Truman, also a Democrat, vetoed it, calling parts of it un-American and discriminatory. His own party overrode him two days later, 278-113 in the House and 57-26 in the Senate.
Three months later, before the law had even taken effect, Truman convened a commission to recommend softening it.
So the law that created the F-1 category became law over the objection of the president from the same party that wrote it.
The work authorization came separately, and earlier. A 1947 rule already let international students stay and work after finishing coursework, and a federal appeals court has noted that Congress has never repudiated that interpretation in nearly eighty years.
The version you’d recognize — twelve months tied to your major — came from a regulation issued under George H.W. Bush in July 1992. The STEM extension was created under George W. Bush in 2008, lengthened to 24 months under Obama in 2016, and expanded to 22 additional fields under Biden in 2022, including data science, business analytics and cloud computing.
Five presidents. Both parties. One program that nobody built in one sitting.
SEVIS, and the fee you paid before you ever arrived
The system that tracks you has two parents, from opposite parties, six years apart.
Year | What happened | President | Party |
1996 | IIRIRA mandates an electronic foreign student tracking system — and a fee on students to fund it | Clinton | D |
2001 | PATRIOT Act requires full implementation by January 2003, authorizes $36.8 million | G.W. Bush | R |
2003 | SEVIS goes live for all incoming students, February 15 | G.W. Bush | R |
Here’s the part most people don’t know: SEVIS wasn’t a reaction to 9/11. It was already law.
Section 641 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, required the government to build an electronic system tracking foreign students — and specifically required that students themselves pay for it. School associations lobbied against the fee at the time.
Then September 11 happened, several hijackers were found to have entered on student visas or attended flight schools, and the PATRIOT Act accelerated a system Congress had already ordered five years earlier.
So the I-901 fee traces to a Democratic president’s signature, and the database traces to a Republican one’s urgency.
Duration of status, which nobody can leave alone
I wrote about this history in July, so I’ll keep it short. But one detail deserves another look.
Year | What happened | President | Party |
1979 | D/S introduced, replacing annual reapplication | Carter | D |
1981 | Reversed to fixed-date admission | Reagan | R |
1983 | D/S restored after the fixed-date system proved unworkable | Reagan | R |
2020 | Proposed again; 32,000+ comments, over 99% opposed; never finalized | Trump | R |
2021 | Withdrawn | Biden | D |
2026 | Finalized, then blocked by a federal judge one day before taking effect | Trump | R |
The detail I missed in July: Reagan both ended D/S and brought it back. Same president, same party, opposite decisions two years apart.
The 1981 reversal wasn’t ideological so much as administrative — and it collapsed under its own paperwork by 1983.
There’s one more comparison worth sitting with. In 2020, DHS received more than 32,000 comments with over 99% opposed, and walked away.
In 2026, DHS received 22,000 comments overwhelmingly opposed and pushed forward anyway. That gap is exactly what Judge Saylor criticized last month.
Sources: Federal Register, 2025 proposed rule, NAFSA
When students were the direct target
Sometimes international students aren’t collateral in a broader immigration fight. Sometimes they’re the point.
Year | What happened | President | Party |
2017 | Three travel bans in nine months, each rewritten after court losses | Trump | R |
2018 | Supreme Court upholds the third version 5-4 in Trump v. Hawaii | — | — |
2020 | ICE rule would force students at online-only schools to transfer or leave; rescinded in 8 days | Trump | R |
2021 | Travel bans revoked on day one | Biden | D |
2025 | Hundreds of SEVIS records terminated without notice to schools; most later restored | Trump | R |
2025 | New travel ban takes effect June 9, later expanded | Trump | R |
The 2020 one is worth remembering in detail, because of how fast it moved.
ICE announced the rule on July 6. Harvard and MIT sued on July 8. More than 200 universities filed briefs, 17 states and DC filed their own suit, and eight federal lawsuits landed within a week. On July 14, ICE rescinded it — five minutes into the hearing, before Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston.
Eight days, start to finish. Same federal courthouse where the duration of status rule was blocked last month.
The travel bans went the other way. The first order was signed January 27, 2017 and almost immediately blocked. A second version followed in March. A third came in September, took effect that December, and in June 2018 the Supreme Court upheld it 5-4. Biden revoked all of it on his first day in office. A new ban took effect in June 2025.
Three versions, each rewritten after losing in court, and the third one survived.
Sources: AP · GBH News · Bricker Graydon
H-1B, the green card lottery, and TPS — all from one bill
Three things currently under pressure from three different directions. All created by the same law, on the same day, signed by the same president.
Year | What happened | President | Party |
1990 | Immigration Act of 1990 creates H-1B, the diversity visa lottery, and Temporary Protected Status | G.H.W. Bush | R |
The Immigration Act of 1990 was introduced by Senator Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat. It passed the Senate 89-8 and the House 264-118. George H.W. Bush signed it on November 29, 1990.
It created the H-1B specialty occupation visa — the one now facing a proposed $103,265 fee.
It created the diversity visa lottery, 55,000 green cards a year for people from countries that send few immigrants. And it created Temporary Protected Status, the program Pierre Damas Bel and roughly 350,000 other Haitians lost last year.
One bipartisan bill, thirty-six years ago, built three of the things being dismantled right now.
Sources: Documented · Boundless
The deportation numbers nobody agrees on
Obama was called “deporter in chief” by immigrant-rights advocates in 2014. Whether that’s fair depends entirely on which number you use.
Measure | Clinton | G.W. Bush | Obama |
Formal removals | ~870,000 | ~2 million | ~3.1 million |
Total deportations (removals + returns) | ~12.3 million | ~10.3 million | ~5.3 million |
Both rows come from the same federal data. They point in opposite directions.
The difference is what kind of deportation. A “return” sends someone home without formal legal penalty. A “removal” is a formal order that carries consequences — including bars on coming back for three years, ten years, or permanently.
Obama’s administration shifted heavily from returns to removals. So fewer people were deported overall than under Clinton or Bush, but each deportation carried far more weight, and far more of them were permanent in effect.
After the criticism landed in 2014, the administration changed its enforcement priorities, deprioritizing people without criminal records and those who had been in the country a long time.
I’m including this not to settle it but because it’s the clearest example in this whole piece of something worth remembering: when someone tells you a president was the toughest or the most lenient on immigration, ask which number they’re using. There’s almost always another one that says the opposite.
Sources: Migration Policy Institute · PolitiFact
So what do you do with all this?
I don’t think the lesson is that the parties are interchangeable. They aren’t, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonest.
The lesson is narrower, and I think more useful: the rules governing your life here were written by people, in specific years, for specific reasons — and those people have changed their minds, reversed each other, and reversed themselves.
Reagan ended duration of status and then brought it back two years later.
George H.W. Bush created both OPT and H-1B.
Clinton ordered the database that tracks you and the fee that funds it.
Truman vetoed the law that created your visa category and lost.
Five presidents from both parties built the work authorization you’re counting on.
None of it was inevitable. None of it is permanent.
That’s cold comfort when the movement is against you. But it’s also the only honest reason to think the direction can change again.
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