An Open Letter
Dear International Students,
As the Executive Committee of the Boston Society of Landscape Architects, we are writing to say: You are welcome here. We want you in our academic programs, in our landscape architecture firms, and in our neighborhoods.
Your presence strengthens, enlivens, and enriches our discipline as well as our professional, academic, and personal communities.
As the landscape architecture community of Massachusetts and Maine, we pride ourselves on being a region where students from all over the world come to study, and a place from which our schools and our landscape architecture firms engage globally. We take pride in the fact that our local landscape architecture community is extremely international, reflective of communities worldwide. As Boston Mayor Martin Walsh
affirms
, “the Boston area attracts the world’s top talent, and over 70,000 international students choose to call Massachusetts home.” Many of us were once international students ourselves.
We strongly endorse the actions of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Boston Architectural College, Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts, and other institutions; Mayor Walsh; Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and 17 other states; and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Katherine Clark, Seth Moulton and their congressional colleagues in vigorously denouncing and fighting this policy.
We applaud the efforts of our chapter's design programs and the faculty, staff, and administrators who are working hard to find ways to support you to safely provide landscape architecture instruction this fall.
International students, as you navigate these difficult days, away from your home countries and away from your families, we want you to know that you have a home and a professional family here. We welcome you.
We are grateful that you are part of our community.
----the Executive Committee of BSLA
