Despite facing friendly fire from so-called national conservatives over a recent interview with the venture capitalists on the All-In podcast, former President Donald Trump’s latest insistence that foreign students be compelled to stay in the country after attending an American college exemplifies the former president’s pro-growth strain of “America First.”
“What I want to do and what I will do it: you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges too — anybody who graduates from a college,” the presumptive Republican nominee said on the podcast. “We need brilliant people.”
Cue the primal scream from protectionist identitarians who wrongly mistook Trump for an ethno-socialist in mere capitalist clothing.
Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt correctly maintained that Trump’s proposal would “only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates” and, in idiosyncratic fashion, “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters,” and the like. But even without the appeal to pathos, this proposal is patently populist if the end goal is to advance the American project and deny our enemies our greatest asset: intelligence.
Under our current system, evenly ostensibly private universities manage to milk taxpayers for cash, not just directly through student grants and research funding, but much more substantially through the federalized and uncapped student loan system that allows these supposed non-profits to set prices at higher and higher prices. Yet the greatest cash cow for colleges comes from abroad, where children of Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks and Saudi oligarchs pay an even higher list price of tuition than domestic students.
If we are going to continue to allow both private and public universities to exclude American applicants in favor of foreign ones — and if those foreign students genuinely do demonstrate greater raw merit than American competitors rather than extra cash and diversity points for admissions brochures, that seems fair enough — then foreign students should not just be vetted before gaining entrance to our ivory towers and all of its lucrative secrets accordingly; those students should be compelled to stay.
Why should we allow CCP scions to spend half a decade learning artificial intelligence from the Big Tech alumni who created contemporary machine learning, only to go back to work for Xi Jinping in diametric opposition to American interests? Why would we want a Saudi student to receive the best petroleum engineering education on the planet with the immediate consequence of being employed by OPEC instead of helping Americans undercut the post-Soviet cartel?
While the national conservatives seeking to hijack the “intellectualized” Trump movement, Trump himself understands the real human capital required to create great American growth better than any think tank wonk in Washington who has deluded himself into believing he’s a man of the people. The fact is that the best and the brightest immigrants from abroad — in direct contrast to the criminal hoards currently invading the Southern border — are indeed those who have made America great.
According to polling from the Economic Innovation Group, the overwhelming majority of Republicans and Americans overall agree with this general sentiment.
“60% of voters overall and 89% of GOP voters agree with Trump’s call for a ‘big, beautiful door’ — pairing tough border politics with a welcoming legal immigration system for those who can contribute to our economy,” the Group finds.
Furthermore, a permanent influx of legal, law-abiding, and highly skilled immigrants is a solution to the correct economic problem. As was true in 2019, the unemployment rate is around a half-century low and, as evidence that we have achieved full employment, is staying there. But in 2024, that full employment is more a weapon against the working class than an asset. The job vacancy to unemployment ratio has remained around its lowest level of the entire century thus far, and as Social Security races towards insolvency in the next decade, the ratio of workers to each beneficiary they’re forced to bankroll is shrinking from three to two.
An expanded, high-skilled workforce of people who are thankful to be here provides modest but quantifiable relief both in the balance of the shrinking class of “makers” giving increasing amounts of money to an aging and expanding class of “takers” and with regards to inflation, which has been exacerbated by the labor shortage.
Of course, all this goes without saying that even without Trump’s proposal, Leavitt’s caveat should be imposed on Day One of a second Trump administration because the status quo is dangerously lax toward student visa applicants.
Our F-1 visa program approves roughly four out of every five applicants, but it’s also extremely generous towards our foreign adversaries, and prior to the pandemic, Chinese nationals received more than a quarter-million (or plurality) of the hundreds of thousands of F-1 visas approved. Nearly 5,000 Russians obtained F-1 visas, and Iranians received more than 1,000. At 74,831, Indian nationals receive the second-highest number of student visas, and at 28,171, Saudi Arabia obtains the third.
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Despite the fact that our H1-B work visa approval rate is as high as our student visa rate, students from nations that hate America tend to return to their home countries instead of attempting to work here. Eight in 10 Chinese nationals who study abroad return to China, and a jarring report by ProPublica has revealed that Saudi diplomats are smuggling home Saudi students in America charged with crimes as grievous as rape and manslaughter.
As evidenced by scores of college campuses overran by cheerleaders for Hamas demanding we “globalize the Intifada” and genocide the Jews, our universities have become breeding grounds for the sort of terrorist sentiment ISIS and the Taliban could only dream of exporting to America. But a better vetting process for foreign students should be coupled by allowing, if not insisting, that we keep the best and the brightest for American interests and America first.