America’s top schools need to stop catering to hostile foreign powers looking to infiltrate the United States and focus more on building a talent pool here at home.
That’s my take from Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement Thursday that the U.S. will begin aggressively revoking visas for Chinese college students connected to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in “critical fields.”
Some publications noted that this move could affect the “bottom line” of many universities and there is a lot of truth to that. Elite schools, like Harvard, rake in huge amounts of cash from admitting Chinese and other foreign-born students who must pay full price to attend.
“One in every four international students comes from China, and Chinese students form a particularly large share of the student body at top U.S. schools,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
The Journal lamented that by booting these Chinese students the U.S. may lose out on a significant talent pool that boosts U.S. research.
There may be some truth to that, certainly in the short term.
However, the foreign student pipeline is also a double-edged sword as many students take the skills they’ve built in the U.S. and take them back to China. Others continue to work here but conduct espionage for the CCP regime.
The reality is that China is a totalitarian state that exerts influence over their people. They aren’t letting their people study abroad because they care about their individual ambitions or because it gives the U.S. a technological edge.
Espionage by Chinese nationals in the U.S. only seems to be increasing, or maybe it isn’t and more are being caught. But a few recent stories highlight the problem.
Fox News reported Thursday on the various incidents in recent years involving several Chinese students with alleged CCP ties. In some cases, they tried to spy on U.S. military installations. For instance, five Chinese nationals, students at the University of Michigan, were caught spying at Camp Grayling in 2023. The U.S. National Guard was training with Taiwanese military members at the time.
China has announced that it will be “ready” to invade Taiwan by 2027, so there is obvious cause for concern.
“Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese national and one-time student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was sentenced to eight years in prison after he was convicted by a jury in 2022 of attempting to commit espionage and theft of trade secrets,” Fox News reported.
Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons told Harvard in a letter that the administration has “serious concerns” that Harvard University has “coordinated with the Chinese Communist Party.”
From Fox News:
Lyons cited several examples, including Harvard accepting $151 million from foreign donors since 2020, working with “China-based academics” on projects funded by an “Iranian government agent,” partnering with Chinese universities and using public funds to do so and collaborating with people “linked to China’s defense-industrial base.”
The sad truth is that the Chinese people live under a totalitarian system. The CCP has created sophisticated tools for tyranny that allow them to pressure their people whether at home or abroad.
Continuing to ignore this would be foolish.
Some online commentators have denounced Trump administration’s visa move, comparing it to Nazi Germany kicking out and persecuting brilliant Jewish scientists who moved to American universities on the eve of World War II and gave us a serious edge in developing the atomic bomb and other technologies.
This is a bad comparison for a few reasons.
Of course, we aren’t persecuting our own citizens and booting them out of the country. We are preventing potential agents from an autocratic regime from infiltrating our society and chipping away at our technological edge.
You can bet that the United States would have been wary about bringing over pro-Nazi German scientists in the 1930s. Even after the war when the German regime was annihilated it was complicated.
And unlike a decade ago, the majority of Chinese students now return to China. So, the skills they build here they take with them back home even if they aren’t doing anything nefarious.
It should also be noted that by booting students from China connected to the CCP there will now be more spots open to Chinese and Asian Americans who have been ruthlessly discriminated against by our elite universities.
Our elite universities really would rather take more money from foreign born students who come with the risk of being literal spies for tyrannical, communist regimes than build a talent pool with what we have in our own country. That has to change.
The Trump administration’s decision to remove CCP-connected students seems to be part of a multi-part strategy to further isolate the Chinese communist regime (that is not at all happy with the move) and to put additional pressure on American institutions to serve Americans once more.
And that’s what putting America first is all about.