Trump: Let In 600,000 Chinese Students To Prop-Up Universities

Authored by Matt Lamb via TheCollegeFix.com,

President Donald Trump doubled down on his support for flooding the country with 600,000 students from Communist China as a way to prop up colleges and universities.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham pressed Trump on his proposal, questioning whether it was in America’s interest to bring in so many Chinese students. The U.S. currently accepts around 300,000 Chinese students per year.

“We do have a lot of people coming in from China. We always have, China and other countries,” Trump said on Monday.

“We also have a massive system of colleges and universities. And if we were to cut that in half, which perhaps makes some people happy, you would have half the colleges in the United States would go out of business.”

He later reiterated that reducing Chinese student visas would “destroy our entire university and college system.”

However, the truth is that Chinese college students are clustered in big cities and at major elite universities that have plenty of American students clamoring to get admitted. But they are competing in some cases with wealthy foreigners who can pay higher tuition and also pay more for rent, pricing out Americans. University of Illinois Urbana Champaign is first supposed to be for Illinois students, and then for Midwestern agricultural students, and then for the country, and then for the world. But it might be better these days to apply for UIUC if you’re from Peking than Peoria.

Trump also does not explain why we need to let in foreign Chinese students who do not share our culture and are likely to return home with their engineering and computer science degrees to work for American competitors. These students do so after undercutting American wages through the “Optional Practical Training” loophole. 

This allows companies to pay lower wages to foreign students in STEM provided they can claim that it is part of their education. “Most foreign students participating in the post-completion science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) OPT extension were from India (48.0%) or China (20.4 %) with 165,524 foreign students participating in STEM OPT in 2024,” Homeland Security reported.

If any foreign student is the same as another one in terms of paying tuition, we should be recruiting from countries that share our culture, like England, France, Poland, and Germany. From a foreign relations standpoint, we could also be increasing the number of high-qualified students from our neighbors Mexico and Canada.

Experts have also raised concerns about Trump’s proposal.

“Taking away spots in schools from Americans and giving them to future Chinese Communists is wrong, and admitting students who have been weaponized by the CCP to commit acts of espionage is extraordinarily dangerous,” China expert Gordon Chang told Fox News.

“American presidents for decades have allowed China’s regime to maintain in our country organizations and extensive networks of agents and diplomats that surveil, intimidate, and coerce Chinese and other students.”

Others have previously warned about the consequences of letting in more Chinese students.

“The CCP leverages Chinese students to steal American research and exploits our open education system to censor Chinese nationals on U.S. soil,” Michael Sobolik previously told The Fix.

“Universities are complicit in this because they depend on international student tuition rates,” the Hudson Institute expert said.

“Policymakers shouldn’t continue a status quo that favors our enemy and leaves our universities exposed to espionage.”