Between Arrival and Belonging Through

I arrived in the United States carrying two suitcases and a carefully folded dream. For years, this place had existed in my imagination as a future home not only built on opportunity and education, but also the quiet promise that if I worked hard enough, I would belong. I didn’t expect that one of the hardest parts of arriving would be learning how to hold both gratitude and fear at the same time.

Growing up in Uganda and later living in multiple countries across continents, I came to understand that international students often live in a continual state of transition. Home is no longer just one place; it’s a memory, a time zone, a voice note from my mother that arrives while I’m walking to class. I miss home in ways that are small but relentless: the smell of familiar food, the ease of speaking without explaining myself, the comfort of knowing the rules without having to read them twice. Missing home is something I expected, but feeling unwanted wasn’t.

In recent months, conversations around immigration enforcement and the role of agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have grown louder, more public and more emotionally charged. For many, these discussions are political or abstract. For international students, they’re personal, even when we try not to make them so. We know that policies debated on screens and podiums have the power to quietly reshape our sense of safety, our plans, our physical presence here and ultimately our future.

One afternoon, I came across a job posting on Handshake for a campus resident hall desk assistant — exactly the kind of position I had been looking for. It aligned with my major, my skills, and the kind of experience I would benefit from. I opened the application, ready, and then I read four words that stopped me: Federal Work Study required. I closed the tab. Not because I wasn’t qualified, but because as an international student, I am ineligible for federal financial aid, including Federal Work Study. There was no appeal process, no alternative pathway listed, and no acknowledgment that a student like me might even exist. I sat with that for a while, the quiet sting of being excluded not by failure, but by circumstance. I didn’t say anything to anyone about it. I simply moved on, the way international students learn to move on, absorbing small defeats privately so as not to seem ungrateful for being here at all.

That moment stayed with me because it was so ordinary. Nobody turned me away at a door. There was no confrontation, no hostility, just a system that hadn’t thought to include me. And that invisibility, I’ve come to realize, is its own kind of silence.

What makes this fear particularly difficult is its invisibility. I go to class, turn in assignments and make weekend plans like any other student. On the surface, nothing looks wrong, yet beneath that normalcy is a constant awareness: my presence here is conditional. My life is documented, time-bound and dependent on compliance with rules that can change without warning. That awareness doesn’t disappear just because I am studying, contributing or doing everything “right.”

I’m careful with my words now more than ever – not because I have something to hide, but because I understand the weight they can carry. International students learn early that perception matters. We’re taught, implicitly and explicitly, to be grateful guests. To not take up too much space. To avoid being misunderstood. Gratitude, though, doesn’t erase fear, and silence doesn’t mean the absence of feeling.

What hurts most is the contrast between expectation and reality. This was the place I imagined building a future, not just earning a degree. I pictured belonging as something that would come naturally with time, through friendships, routines and shared experiences. Instead, there are moments when I feel suspended between worlds: no longer fully at home where I came from, but not entirely secure where I am now.

This fear doesn’t come from any single event but from accumulation: from headlines, from overheard conversations, from the knowledge that systems are often indifferent to individual stories. It comes from realizing that even as I begin to feel rooted here, my status remains temporary, and even though I love this place deeply, I still know that it may never fully claim me.

For this to change, universities must move beyond passive inclusion. It is not enough to recruit international students and celebrate their diversity on brochures while maintaining systems that quietly exclude them from the same opportunities extended to their peers. Institutions should expand on-campus employment funding that is accessible regardless of citizenship status, so that a student’s ambition is never stopped by four words on a job posting. They should communicate proactively and clearly during periods of immigration policy uncertainty, rather than leaving students to navigate fear through rumors and headlines. And they should invest in mental health resources that explicitly account for the unique pressures international students carry, pressures that go beyond academics and into the very question of whether they are safe.

Society, too, must reckon with the way it narrates international students: as economic contributors when convenient, as outsiders when politically useful. We are not guests performing gratitude in exchange for tolerance. We are learners, builders, and future professionals who chose to invest our time, money, and energy in this country. That choice deserves to be met with structures that reflect genuine welcome, not just the appearance of it.

I share this not to assign blame, but because I believe that naming something is the first step to changing it. As a student studying advertising, I understand the power of story: how narrative shapes perception, and how the stories we tell about people determine how we treat them. The story told about international students needs to change, and I intend to be part of telling a truer one.

And yet, I stay hopeful. Not because fear has disappeared, but because hope feels like an act of quiet resistance. I continue to show up, to learn, to contribute, to dream, because I believe that presence itself has meaning and that being here, even with uncertainty, matters.

This isn’t a rejection of the country I came to study in, nor is it a political statement. It’s simply the truth of what it feels like to live between permission and belonging: to miss home while trying to make a new one, to love a place that you are still unsure loves you back.

For now, I carry both fear and hope in the same way I carried those two suitcases when I arrived: carefully, deliberately, and with the understanding that neither tells the whole story on its own.