President Donald Trump has announced plans to expand the student visa program for Chinese nationals, a policy some say is problematic and a significant departure from his stated agenda, according to Just the News. White House officials were blindsided when officials in the Trump administration considered revoking these visas due to national security concerns.
On Monday, Trump announced plans to import 600,000 students from China to attend America's colleges and universities. Trump believes this is an integral part of brokering a deal to end the tariff war between China and the U.S. and has floated a possible meeting with the nation's leader.
"I’d like to meet him this year. President Xi [Jinping] would like me to come to China. We’re taking a lot of money in from China because of the tariffs and different things.… It’s a much better relationship economically than it was before with [former President Joe] Biden," Trump told reporters.
"I mean, they just took him to the cleaners. We’re going to allow it, it’s very important, 600,000 students. We’re going to get along with China. But it’s a different relationship that we have now with China," Trump added.
It's surprising to hear Trump speak about broadening the program and importing more people from China, considering the growing threat it poses. Allowing Chinese nationals to come to the U.S. to study opens up numerous vulnerabilities, including intellectual property theft, economic espionage, and government infiltration.
Lawmakers have been sounding alarm bells that the Chinese Communist Party is the top concern for these attacks, and it's more than just theoretical. According to the House Committee on Homeland Security, at least 224 cases of espionage and other CCP activity occurred between 2000 and 2023, with 60 of those were found across 20 states during then-President Joe Biden's administration.
The way they go about it is also problematic in light of Trump's plan to import 600,000 students. "China continues to utilize ‘non-traditional’ collectors to conduct a plurality of their nefarious efforts here in the U.S. due to their successful ability to hide in plain sight," said former Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center Bill Evanina in 2023.
"The non-traditional collectors, serving as engineers, businesspersons, academics, and students, are shrouded in legitimate work and research, and oftentimes become unwitting tools for the CCP and its intelligence apparatus," he added during his testimony at the time. Furthermore, the communist nation codified spying into state law in 2017, mandating that citizens called on by the government to conduct espionage must do so.
Even Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said just last month that the State Department needed to "aggressively" revoke student visas from Chinese nationals "with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields," he said in a State Department statement. Rubio also recommended the government "revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong."
It appears that the consensus is that the U.S. should proceed with caution in granting these student visas, let alone expanding them. Moreover, Trump ran on an "America First" agenda during his 2024 campaign, which leaves many to wonder how importing more than half a million students from a communist country serves that end.
This has caused friction with even the most steadfast of Trump supporters, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). "We should not let in 600,000 CHINESE students to attend American colleges and universities that may be loyal to the CCP," Greene said on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday. "Why are we allowing 600,000 students from China to replace our American student's opportunities? We should never allow that," she added.
Fox News's Laura Ingraham posed the same question to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. "The president’s point of view is that what would happen if you didn’t have those 600K students is that you’d empty them from the top, all the students would go up to better schools, and the bottom 15% of universities and colleges would go out of business in America. "He’s taking a rational economic view, which is classic Donald Trump," Lutnick claimed on The Ingraham Angle.
This is a very unusual move for Trump, especially given his harsh rhetoric against China for all of these years. Many are panicking that he's somehow pivoted away from his original agenda, but Trump has proven himself to be a master negotiator, and this is likely just another tactic meant to bring his adversary to his side of things.
