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The Real Reason Trump Wants To Ban Chinese College Students

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© 2018 Bloomberg Finance LP

There are over 350,000 Chinese students studying and researching at U.S. colleges and universities, and they’ve become one of the targets of recent escalating trade frictions between the U.S. and China. Earlier this month, China’s Education Ministry issued a warning to students to be wary of studying in the U.S., citing increases in visa refusals, delayed renewals, and other restrictions. On Thursday, the South China Morning Post published an article discussing the potential fallout of these restrictions, highlighting the major accomplishments researchers of Chinese origin have made to U.S. institutions, from universities to the tech sector. But even without reading the article, the benefits of Chinese students at U.S. schools is obvious, from the potential for collaboration, cross-cultural exchange, research breakthroughs, and future change-makers gaining access to top-notch resources. The only downside, it seems, is the “brain drain” that China experiences when those high-achieving students stay in the U.S.—a drain that these restrictions will reverse. If that’s the case, then why is the U.S. shooting itself in the proverbial foot?

To figure it out, we have to go back to October of 2018, when the Financial Times published an article titled, “US considered ban on student visas for Chinese nationals.” They broke the story that, earlier that year, the Trump administration had spent considerable time discussing an outright ban on Chinese nationals studying in the U.S. It was a proposal headlined by White House aide Stephen Miller and was tabled after considerable pushback from other advisors. I don't know what's changed, beyond that perhaps it was easier for Stephen Miller to slip his pet project through as just another aspect of a trade war with China, rather than a stand-alone initiative. However, the concerns that were raised by other advisors still remain.

So is the real reason that Chinese students pose a threat to national security? Apparently, that was a justification Stephen Miller used, but just because something is the justification doesn't mean it’s the reason. If the reason were to prevent Chinese students from gaining access to privileged scientific information not available in China, then the ban would only need to target graduate students and researchers. At the risk of offending undergraduate students doing important (but widely circulated) work, I find it hard to believe that the average college student in the U.S. has access to scientific intelligence unknown to Chinese researchers. I’d also like to point out, as I did in my last article on this subject, that thinking any person of a specific national origin could be a spy is exactly the mindset that led our country to create Japanese internment camps.

So if these restrictions aren’t really about hurting Chinese interests or protecting national security, then what is the real reason for them? Nationalism and racial bias are certainly in play here. Discrimination against Chinese, Asian, and Asian-American students at U.S. institutions are on the rise, from the Harvard discrimination lawsuit to the firing of two professors at Emory for Chinese ties to these recent instances of Chinese students being mistreated for speaking Chinese.

Even if racial bias or nationalism aren’t the core reasons for these policy changes, they still amplify those attitudes, as was highlighted in this NPR story. Even if these restrictions were walked back tomorrow, they have already had a chilling effect on our relationship with our largest group of international students.

That being said, I believe that the real reason for this proposed ban and current restrictions is something far more foolish. Nationalism is somewhat to be expected from a man who ran under the slogan “Make America Great Again.” However, it should be unacceptable to even the most nationalistic to deliberately undermine our higher education system, one of the areas where the United States is indisputably the best in the world. Even in the face of large-scale loss of funding, the United States higher education system consistently produces the most widely cited and influential research in the world.

And yet, the damage that this ban would do to the U.S. higher education system was presented to Donald Trump not as a risk, but as a legitimate reason to pursue it further. Hurting elite U.S. colleges was the goal, in order to punish institutions seen as critical of the Trump administration. The reason that this proposed ban was set aside last year was because the current ambassador to China, former Iowa governor Terry Branstad, “argued that Mr. Miller’s plan would take a much bigger toll on smaller colleges, including in Iowa, than on wealthy Ivy League universities.” As federal and state funding dwindles, these schools increasingly rely on international students (who generally pay full price) to meet their budget shortfalls. And these schools know they’re in danger—the University of Illinois recently took out insurance policies against the potential loss of Chinese enrollment.

Now that Mr. Trump has further devolved his relationship with the Ivy League (in the interim, Michael Cohen came forward with shocking testimony about how he had threatened Trump’s alma maters in order to keep his grades private), it seems that he no longer cares about the public state universities that will take the lion’s share of the damage, instead of his intended target, the Ivy League and other elite schools. At the end of the day, these restrictions are bad for all parties involved—but it’s worth repeating that his intended target is our higher education system, a group of nonprofit institutions that are part of what makes America great.

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