By Sept. 29, el-Gaili realized that he would not be returning to Harvard for the first term of his final year. When HLS administrators says that he could gain credit for his studies at SOAS, he moved into a more permanent London residence.

In a letter postmarked Oct. 17, the U.S. consulate announced that it was ready to issue him his visa. On Nov. 19, he finally received his stamped passport.

He promptly sent an e-mail with the subject line “Saga Ends!” to his friends in Cambridge, happily announcing that he would return almost in time for the Harvard-Yale game.

Cambridge, At Last

El-Gaili says he’s glad to be back in the country that has been his home for nine years.

But, not wanting to face the ordeal of renewing his U.S. visa again, he has decided to work in London after graduation.

“It’s just professionally and personally difficult to live with these restrictive regulations and the humiliation of having to get fingerprinted at each entry and exit,” he says.

And while el-Gaili does not know precisely where his career will lead him, he feels now, more than ever, that he will eventually return to Sudan in a professional capacity.

“These have always been my long-term plans,” he says, “more so now that I have fewer choices.”

If other highly educated and motivated students—students who, in spite of their accomplishments, are inconvenienced simply because of their national origins—decide not to remain in the U.S. because of similar trouble in acquiring visas, he says, the nation could suffer as a whole, inducing its own “brain drain.”

The U.S. also risks spurning its potential allies by rendering itself so inaccessible to the most promising scholars and leaders of certain nations, he says.

“The people who come here typically like this country,” el-Gaili says. “These are the people who, upon their return to their home counties, become forces of liberal change.”

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.