The Chinese Student Crackdown

No “critical fields”: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday evening that the visas of certain Chinese students would soon be revoked, especially those studying in “critical fields” and those with ties of any sort to the Chinese Communist Party, and that greater scrutiny would be applied to future visa applicants.

This isn’t the first time a Trump administration has attempted a crackdown, but this one is likely to be much more widespread. “In 2020, officials in the first Trump administration canceled the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers after announcing they were banning from campuses Chinese citizens with direct ties to military universities in their country,” reports The New York Times. “It was the first time the U.S. government had moved to bar a category of Chinese students from getting access to American universities, a ban the Biden administration kept in place.”

“Such a politicized and discriminatory move lays bare the US lie behind the so-called freedom and openness that the US touts,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning. “It will only further undermine its image in the world and national reputation.”

There may well be good reasons for the Trump administration to want to root out or preempt espionage, but it’s not clear that such a widespread, untargeted crackdown is necessarily the best means of accomplishing that. Still, looked at as part of a whole pattern of behavior, it’s a provocation: The U.S. has been souring ties with China, first through tariffs, then through negotiations over a rare earth minerals deal, and now through a crackdown on some 275,000 foreign students.

The administration is also trying to ban foreign students from enrolling at Harvard, and the State Department has halted all interviews for new student visas, saying it will focus more intensely on vetting prospective applicants’ social media postings. It looks a bit like this administration simply wants most foreigners to leave, and to deter possible entrants from ever coming.

Huge tariff ruling: A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that the president “had wrongly invoked a 1977 law in imposing his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs on dozens of countries and they were therefore illegal,” reports Bloomberg. That ruling also applies to the tariffs imposed before Liberation Day on China, Mexico, and Canada, purportedly over “national security” and fentanyl trafficking. Now, the Trump administration will appeal this ruling, possibly going all the way up to the Supreme Court. (“The ruling doesn’t affect Trump’s first-term levies on many imports from China or sectoral duties planned or already imposed on goods including steel,” adds Bloomberg, “which are based on a different legal foundation that the Trump administration may now be forced to make more use of to pursue its tariff campaign.”)

“It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai in a statement. “President Trump pledged to put America First, and the Administration is committed to using every lever of executive power to address this crisis and restore American Greatness.”

“The ruling is a welcome blow to the Trump administration’s freewheeling use of [the International Emergency Economic Powers Act] in ways that seemingly ignored the plain text of the law—which authorizes executive action only in response to ‘unusual and extraordinary’ threats to the United States,” writes Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

How to make DOGE permanent: President Donald Trump is sending suggestions for spending cuts to Congress in an effort to make the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts permanent. Unfortunately, the $9.4 billion-in-cuts package falls far short of what would actually be needed to make an impact.

Two Republicans familiar with the plan told Politico that “it will target NPR and PBS, as well as foreign aid agencies that have already been gutted by the Trump administration.” But let’s be real: There’s $1.6 trillion in discretionary spending allocated each year, and discretionary spending itself is but a small chunk of the total federal spending—less than a third. Mandatory spending—things like entitlement programs—is the area that really needs to be attacked, but it’s politically much harder to make, say, substantive reforms to Social Security.

So $9.4 billion in cuts it is! A tiny drop in the bucket. What a bleak political reality: that this is what DOGE’s efforts culminate in, and that this is the way lawmakers intend to codify the cuts.

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Scenes from Texas: I’m back home, where Governor Greg Abbott just signed a law requiring Google and Apple to verify app store users’ ages. Some “lawmakers and some social media companies argu[e] that app stores should serve as centralized clearinghouses for verifying users’ ages,” notes CNN, with Abbott’s office adding that “Texas will empower parents to have more control over the online content their children can access.”

It’s similar to Utah’s law, which also aims to prevent kids from being able to unilaterally download certain apps. Like Utah, Texas will now require app stores to both verify ages and obtain parents’ consent before a child downloads an app or makes a purchase through an app. “But Texas’ law adds an additional requirement,” notes CNN. “The app stores must also confirm that the parent or guardian approving a minor’s app downloads has the legal authority to make decisions for that child.” On the one hand, this means parents are forced to hand over an ID (and hope these companies will protect their private data after it’s been verified); on the other, it appears to be a pretty strict requirement that will be hard for kids to circumvent, so it might end up being effective.

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QUICK HITS

• It’s not clear to me how cutting off the supply of au pairs is a pro-family policy that will encourage people to have more kids:

The Trump administration just shutdown all new interviews for au pairs on the J-1 visa. pic.twitter.com/JSqbphtZ2S

— The Alex Nowrasteh (@AlexNowrasteh) May 27, 2025

This could have the unfortunate effect of raising childcare costs in certain markets. But I also haven’t heard a single person cogently argue why au pairs are a threat that must be suppressed; this is a form of childcare that can take the form of a nanny, or more the form of a mother’s helper, and it can be very collaborative, allowing mother and au pair to tend to children side-by-side. Some mothers don’t want to send their kids to daycare full-time or to have a full-time nanny, and there’s a lot of gradient between “no help at all” and “totally outsourcing all domestic labor” that pro-family policy makers should consider. Au pairs, who live in the home with the family, are typically here for defined periods of time—frequently a 12-month minimum, with the option to renew for up to 12 additional months, if it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement—so it’s a way for parents to secure an arrangement that’s neither long-term nor short-term, operating somewhat differently from typical nanny arrangements. It’s just so odd to me that the administration sees a problem with this.

• “Only Two Companies Make Parachutes for U.S. Troops,” reads a Wall Street Journal headline. “Deportations Would Crush One.” Good read.
• Several folks have reached out to me concerned that I fell victim to a satire website, re: Pete Hegseth item yesterday. Let me be clear: All roasting of Pete Hegseth is intentional, for your amusement and mine.
• “Equity” curriculums basically just lower the bar for all students to an embarrassing degree:

New SF public school plan would

- eliminate homework and weekly tests from counting toward semester grade
- allow students to take the final exam multiple times
- convert all B grades into As, and all Fs into Cs

It’s hard to see the difference between this policy and what… https://t.co/1ajUs8Ay3Q pic.twitter.com/p6wMyJDHIi

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) May 28, 2025

• Pretty much:

Centrists are out of touch in that we care a lot about procedural and policy stuff the voters do not and sometimes treat normal people like incomprehensible ciphers, leftists are out of touch in that they are often literally in favor of murder https://t.co/Eha9xFtGuj

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) May 28, 2025

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Source: https://reason.com/2025/05/29/the-chinese-student-crackdown/