hat do Kamala Harris and Barack Obama have in common beyond their shared racial background? Obama’s father and Harris’s parents came to the U.S. as foreign students from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. This legacy is important to remember as the U.S. stands poised to celebrate International Education Week from November 16-20, a joint initiative by the U.S. Departments of State and Education to honor America’s engagement with the rest of the world through the most powerful tool of soft diplomacy: an American education. A tool that has been at risk for the past four years as damaging proposals targeting international students and skilled immigrants have led to a decline in the appeal of America as a beacon of learning and hope.
The senior Obama arrived in the U.S. in the 1960s during the “African Airlift,” an ambitious scholarship program, which was the brainchild of Tom Mboya, a trade unionist and Kenyan leader, and John F. Kennedy, who asked the Kennedy Foundation to pay for the airfare of 250 Kenyan scholars, including the senior Obama. Between 1959 and 1963, 800 post-graduate students from Kenya received scholarships to study in the U.S. and Canada, including the Nobel Prize winner, Wangari Maathai. While Obama senior was not officially part of the airlift since he had other funds for his air travel to the University of Hawaii, he is nonetheless considered part of the “airlift generation” from Africa.
What happened after Tom Mboya launched the African airlift captures the impact of international education beyond any numbers. Susan Mboya, Tom Mboya’s daughter, grew up with the strong influence of an American education in their home and circle, where she describes her own educational path as “decidedly American,” obtaining all her degrees at universities in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Before Susan, her mother, who was part of the airlift, had obtained a degree from Ohio. But the influence of an American education did not end with these two generations of Mboyas. Dr. Susan Mboya has not only encouraged all her nephews and nieces to study in the U.S., but she went on to found the Zawadi Africa Education Fund that was inspired by her parents’ legacy and gives underprivileged Kenyan girls an opportunity to study abroad in the U.S. What grew out of an idea her father had in the 1960s is continuing to have an impact on generations of Kenyan students today.
For Shyamala Gopalan, Kamala Harris’s mother, the path as an international student to the U.S. was different and, unlike the senior Obama, she ended up staying and joining the ranks of skilled immigrants who could once again come to the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s when the country overhauled its immigration policies to attract the world’s best and brightest. This is a path I know well, having arrived in the U.S. as a female international student from India in 1992, 34 years after Dr. Gopalan, but carrying the same educational aspirations and the dreams of my forbearers. And even before Dr. Gopalan and 83 years before I received my doctorate from an American university, there was a Miss. K. Tulaskar, an Indian graduate student at UC Berkeley, who in a 1915 article titled, Why Should Hindu Girls Go to America described what drew her to the U.S.: the broadening of the mind through travel and education, and the fluidity of the American education system that encouraged flexibility and experimentation as opposed to rigid doctrines. This is what had attracted international students like Shyamala Gopalan and remains true for the 1.1 million international students who study in the U.S. today.
The similar journeys to America but the different outcomes for the senior Obama, Gopalan, and the Mboyas also underscore the importance of international students whether they stay on in the U.S. and become valuable immigrants, or return to their home countries and become cultural ambassadors for the U.S., widening America’s influence and helping build bridges. By remaining in the U.S. Dr. Gopalan contributed to ground-breaking research on breast cancer, one among many immigrants who today constitute half of the doctoral-level science workforce in the U.S. and are indispensable to U.S. science and innovation.
During this International Education Week, let us remember that keeping the doors open to international students is the best thing that America can do for its future, remaining—as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said in her victory speech—a “country of possibility.”
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America Calling: The Legacy of Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and a Million Students
November 17, 2020
W
hat do Kamala Harris and Barack Obama have in common beyond their shared racial background? Obama’s father and Harris’s parents came to the U.S. as foreign students from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. This legacy is important to remember as the U.S. stands poised to celebrate International Education Week from November 16-20, a joint initiative by the U.S. Departments of State and Education to honor America’s engagement with the rest of the world through the most powerful tool of soft diplomacy: an American education. A tool that has been at risk for the past four years as damaging proposals targeting international students and skilled immigrants have led to a decline in the appeal of America as a beacon of learning and hope.
The senior Obama arrived in the U.S. in the 1960s during the “African Airlift,” an ambitious scholarship program, which was the brainchild of Tom Mboya, a trade unionist and Kenyan leader, and John F. Kennedy, who asked the Kennedy Foundation to pay for the airfare of 250 Kenyan scholars, including the senior Obama. Between 1959 and 1963, 800 post-graduate students from Kenya received scholarships to study in the U.S. and Canada, including the Nobel Prize winner, Wangari Maathai. While Obama senior was not officially part of the airlift since he had other funds for his air travel to the University of Hawaii, he is nonetheless considered part of the “airlift generation” from Africa.
What happened after Tom Mboya launched the African airlift captures the impact of international education beyond any numbers. Susan Mboya, Tom Mboya’s daughter, grew up with the strong influence of an American education in their home and circle, where she describes her own educational path as “decidedly American,” obtaining all her degrees at universities in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Before Susan, her mother, who was part of the airlift, had obtained a degree from Ohio. But the influence of an American education did not end with these two generations of Mboyas. Dr. Susan Mboya has not only encouraged all her nephews and nieces to study in the U.S., but she went on to found the Zawadi Africa Education Fund that was inspired by her parents’ legacy and gives underprivileged Kenyan girls an opportunity to study abroad in the U.S. What grew out of an idea her father had in the 1960s is continuing to have an impact on generations of Kenyan students today.
For Shyamala Gopalan, Kamala Harris’s mother, the path as an international student to the U.S. was different and, unlike the senior Obama, she ended up staying and joining the ranks of skilled immigrants who could once again come to the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s when the country overhauled its immigration policies to attract the world’s best and brightest. This is a path I know well, having arrived in the U.S. as a female international student from India in 1992, 34 years after Dr. Gopalan, but carrying the same educational aspirations and the dreams of my forbearers. And even before Dr. Gopalan and 83 years before I received my doctorate from an American university, there was a Miss. K. Tulaskar, an Indian graduate student at UC Berkeley, who in a 1915 article titled, Why Should Hindu Girls Go to America described what drew her to the U.S.: the broadening of the mind through travel and education, and the fluidity of the American education system that encouraged flexibility and experimentation as opposed to rigid doctrines. This is what had attracted international students like Shyamala Gopalan and remains true for the 1.1 million international students who study in the U.S. today.
The similar journeys to America but the different outcomes for the senior Obama, Gopalan, and the Mboyas also underscore the importance of international students whether they stay on in the U.S. and become valuable immigrants, or return to their home countries and become cultural ambassadors for the U.S., widening America’s influence and helping build bridges. By remaining in the U.S. Dr. Gopalan contributed to ground-breaking research on breast cancer, one among many immigrants who today constitute half of the doctoral-level science workforce in the U.S. and are indispensable to U.S. science and innovation.
During this International Education Week, let us remember that keeping the doors open to international students is the best thing that America can do for its future, remaining—as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said in her victory speech—a “country of possibility.”
