When President Donald Trump descended the escalator in June of 2015, he reminded Americans of something many of their leaders had forgotten: “Our country has tremendous potential. We have tremendous people.”
And he was right — Americans are tremendous people with tremendous potential, which is why it’s so disheartening that the same man now says he wants to give 500,000 Chinese nationals student visas.
Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Thursday that he doesn’t want to “insult” China by denying student visas to some half a million Chinese nationals.
“‘I don’t want any students’ is a very insulting thing to say to a country,” Trump told Hannity — as if not insulting China should ever be a top priority or a consideration on which to base policy decisions. “If you don’t have those students, good students by the way … if you want to see a university system die, take a half a million people out of it. … The ones that won’t be hurt are the top schools; the top schools will do fine. But your lower schools … the ones that don’t do quite as well, those schools, they’ll be dying all over the place.”
The remarks are similar to comments he made last year, claiming it is “very important” to allow 600,000 Chinese students to attend American colleges, otherwise lower-tiered colleges would struggle to stay in business.
But as The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood wrote in these pages last year, “The correct number of Chinese nationals who should be allowed to study at American universities is zero.”
Part of the “America First” movement that Trump revived — and in many ways expanded — is that Americans should be prioritized in every instance, including education. Displacing hundreds of thousands of Americans so that foreign nationals from a hostile regime can take their places is the opposite of America First. Americans should not be forced to compete with the globe for a spot at one of their own institutions, especially not with citizens of a country that routinely spies on us, steals our intellectual property, and tried to kill us all with a virus in 2020.
Further, the national security risks of importing hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals for “education” are numerous. Last May a Chinese national who was admitted to the University of Minnesota as a graduate student was deported after he was convicted for taking pictures of “military installations” in Virginia with a drone. As Fleetwood pointed out, it’s not that all Chinese students studying in America are CCP operatives, but “given China’s existing national security laws, however, Americans are right to be concerned.”
Trump also should not forget that a number of our institutions still offer high-quality teaching that should not be wasted on educating and refining the next generation of Chinese people. American institutions should be for Americans.
It’s rather bizarre that the America First president appears willing to accept Chinese nationals displacing Americans so long as it helps prop up struggling colleges further down the totem pole. If the American university system cannot survive without importing foreigners, then that institution deserves to go under. Further, it’s self-defeating for a nation supposedly trying to compete with China to allow its own nationals to displace Americans at our top institutions.
But that’s not all the president said in his interview with Hannity.
“I frankly think that it’s good that people come from other countries and they learn our culture and many of them want to stay here. I think it’s good,” the president said.
“Not everybody agrees with me,” he continued, and on that issue, many in the America First movement do not.
The problem with Trump’s claim is that it sounds like it came straight from Mike Pence or any other RINO, grounded in a pre-2016 understanding of immigration and assimilation, that is, the old assumption that mass immigration is good for America because newcomers adopt our culture.
But the data doesn’t show that. Instead, a 2017 study of 128 Chinese students at two U.S. universities found that the top reasons Chinese students came to the U.S. were that the education was better here and they wanted a “new perspective” on their native country. While non-academic factors played a role for some, the biggest drive was academic and pragmatic, with many reporting plans to “return to China for jobs.”
Another study found Chinese students engage in “protective segregation,” which consists of intentionally “hanging out among themselves.” Part of this is due to the obvious linguistic and cultural barriers, but self-segregation is also a sign that students do not want to “learn our culture” but rather stay immersed in their own through social cliques. (I am a first-hand witness to this “protective segregation,” having seen it myself during my years at Fordham University.)
Data from the CCP itself (which may be instructive, though it should not be taken at face value) states the communist country has seen an “accelerating flow of talent back to the country.” The Chinese Ministry of Education states “that from 1978, when China launched its reform and opening up policy, to 2024, a total of 8.88 million Chinese went abroad to study. Among the 7.43 million students who completed their studies, 6.44 million chose to return to China.”
In other words, Chinese students are not coming here to “learn our culture.” They are coming to milk our education system and then bring their newfound education back to China to make China great.
It’s one thing for the Chinese to do that — it’s another for the president of the United States to seemingly pronounce it acceptable.
