You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

First, there was the travel ban.

There's been chaos and confusion at airports around the world tonight.

On the seven Muslim majority countries, here's the map.

And then the Trump administration froze green cards for new immigrants until the end of this year.

The announcement came in a late-night tweet.

President Trump saying he intends to close the U.S. to immigrants.

Then some Chinese graduate students and researchers were singled out.

On May 29th, President Trump announced a proclamation to suspend entry to graduate students and post-doctoral researchers who attended universities affiliated with the Chinese military.

So I was kind of psychologically prepared.

Mehmet Doan had heard the rumors of what might be coming next.

He grew up in Turkey and came to the U.S. for his PhD in 2010.

And is now working as a postdoc in the physics department at UC Berkeley.

So it wasn't a shock when in June, the administration blocked visas for a wide variety of jobs, including the H1B visa, which is what a lot of tech workers and scientists like Mehmet were hoping to get.

I try to be more in peace with uncertainty.

And this is what I've been trying to do for the past couple of years.

It's been a struggle for Mehmet to do his research in the United States.

One time he got stuck outside of the country for nine months because of a visa issue, right before he was supposed to start his job.

And then now, Mehmet has an approval for an H1B visa and was just one step away from getting it activated when the executive order came down.

And that makes any kind of life planning really hard.

It's unfair to my spouse to put her through the same thing for my own career choices.

For instance, we are unable to really contemplate having children at this point with all of this uncertainty because we don't even know where we're going to be living in the next year.

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