President Donald Trump is famously an “America First” proponent. He campaigned on this agenda multiple times, convincing and proving to tens of millions of Americans that he is indeed about putting them first.
However, his seemingly quixotic stance on Chinese students in the U.S. is baffling. On the one hand, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared in May that his department would be limiting the number of Chinese nationals who come stateside for college. “Under President Trump’s leadership,” Rubio disclosed, “the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce underscored this stance, stating: “The United States … will not tolerate the CCP’s exploitation of U.S. universities or theft of U.S. research, intellectual property, or technologies to grow its military power, conduct intelligence collection, or repress voices of opposition. The Trump Administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding our national security and public safety through our visa process, obviously very openly and transparently applied by Secretary Marco Rubio.”
In August, however, President Trump asserted it was “very important” to host 600,000 Chinese students. (That number is cumulative over two years, so it’s really 300,000 per year). He told reporters:
It’s very insulting to say [China’s] students can’t come here. Because they’ll go out and start building schools … but I like that [China’s] students come here. I like that other countries’ students come here. And you know what would happen if they didn’t? Our college system would go to hell, very quickly. … And it wouldn’t be the top colleges; it would be colleges that struggle on the bottom. … And I told this to President Xi: That we’re honored to have their students here. Now with that, we check, and we’re careful, and we see who’s there. … But we have a tremendous college system, the best in the world. Nobody [comes] even close — that’s why China sends them here. You can call it an industry if you want. … I’m honored to have the students from China come here.
Trump’s public reasoning is that we need Chinese students because they keep our own education system afloat. There is some terrible truth to that, to be sure. Foreign students pay full tuition and are a major source of revenue for the universities. But is this perspective “America First”? By no means.
Chinese students — and foreign nationals more generally — take spots away from American students. Some 1.1 million international students were enrolled at American colleges and universities during the 2023-2024 school year. In other words, admissions offices are oftentimes literally putting Americans last.
If 300,000 of those international students are Chinese nationals, that is a significant proportion.
American universities are already infiltrated by Confucius Institutes. These purportedly friendly educational facilities undermine our American way of life. As of 2020, these institutes have been classified by the U.S. government as propaganda peddlers for the Chinese government. There are still 10 schools in the U.S. that have Confucius Institutes in spite of the designation. They could be shut down today if only the administrative leaders would put pressure on their schools.
Several Chinese students have engaged in spying and terrorism plotting. Their actions ranged from filming or photographing military bases to trying to smuggle in dangerous fungi as a form of agricultural terrorism. All Chinese citizens “shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of,” according to Article 7 of the PRC National Intelligence Law. While not every Chinese international student may want to engage in espionage, they are required to by law.
President Trump has claimed that he is not using Chinese students as pawns in a negotiation tactic, nor is this a quid pro quo for the cooperation of American universities in the fight against anti-Semitism on campus. Only time will tell if this is true. But if Trump is sincere in his pro-Chinese-student stance, he may need to think again. China is not our friend and, in fact, is actively wooing countries like India to its cause of a new world hegemony.
China will use every tool in its arsenal to undermine America’s power and influence — especially from within.
