Rubio: U.S. Will Start Revoking Visas of Chinese Students Connected to CCP or “Studying in Critical Fields”
“the move could disrupt a major source of income for American schools and a crucial pipeline of talent for U.S. technology companies”
Marco Rubio 2.0 strikes again.
The Secretary of State announced this week that the United States is going to revoke visas for Chinese students with connections to the Chinese Communist Party, or if they are studying a critical field.
Several years ago, when Rubio was still in the Senate, he and other Republicans made a concerted effort to go after Confucius Institutes on college campuses for their alleged connections to intellectual espionage. This appears to be an extension of those efforts.
The U.S. will begin revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) May 28, 2025
Reuters reports:
US says it will start revoking visas for Chinese students
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday the United States will start “aggressively” revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.
If applied to a broad segment of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese university students in the United States, the move could disrupt a major source of income for American schools and a crucial pipeline of talent for U.S. technology companies.
President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to ramp up deportations and revoke student visas as part of wide-ranging efforts to fulfill its hardline immigration agenda.
In a statement, Rubio said the State Department will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from China and Hong Kong.
“The U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students,” he said.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This CBS News report notes the numbers involved in this decision:
China is the second-largest country of origin for international students, behind only India. In the 2023-24 school year, more than 270,000 international students were from China, making up roughly a quarter of all foreign students in the United States.
The action comes at a time of intensifying scrutiny of the ties between U.S. higher education and China. House Republicans this month pressed Duke University to cut its ties with a Chinese university, saying it allowed Chinese students to gain access to federally-funded research at Duke.
Last year, House Republicans issued a report warning that hundreds of millions of dollars in defense funding was going to research partnerships linked to the Chinese government, providing “back-door access to the very foreign adversary nation whose aggression these capabilities are necessary to protect against.”
The announcement came a day after the State Department told embassies and consulates worldwide to temporarily stop scheduling new student visa interviews, in a cable obtained by CBS News. The cable said the department is preparing “expanded social media vetting” of visa applicants.
It’s important to note that this is about more than higher education. Academic and intellectual espionage is a national security issue. It’s amazing that we have not taken steps to address this before now.
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And we all know how well that will go over. Someone will inevitably file a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction and yet another liberal, lapdog federal judge will grant them a “temporary injunction” and the issue will then be slow-walked through the federal court system for at least another three years before a final decision is handed down. Guaranteed to happen.
Guarantee you that is being done right now starting with the critical job of finding a helpful judge to get this injunction in place by COB Friday!
I don’t understand how a judge can prevent the executive from determining who gets a visa. Obviously, that hasn’t stop judges from doing that, but isn’t it unconstitutional for the judge to intrude on the executive branch?
Progressives are incompetent at governance but extremely adept at identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in the democratic process that allow zealots to subvert the will of the majority. They now have skillfully utilized the obstructionistic abilities of several hundred unelected activist Federal judges who are now exercising their nationwide veto power to thwart anything they can, knowing that the process of reversal will depend upon a decidedly ambivalent Supreme Court or a bitterly divided and ineffectual Congress.
I had a chinese student working for me as an intern a few years ago. She did good work and english skills were fairly high and very smart. However, in discussions about her personal life there was a strong loyalty to the chinese government along with an impression that her main reason for education and working in the US was for the future benefit of china in the form of better knowledge of american trade.
Part of that is survival. If a Chinese citizen studying abroad starts to speak about certain things that the Party doesn’t want them to think about, they quickly find themselves back in China without the ability to leave, along with any of their family similarly restricted. Same if they post certain things on social media. They’re monitored, not only with rewards for informing on each other, but by some very astute members of the Party (i.e. spies) who claim to espousing these same things. If the student doesn’t report the wrongthink…
Yes, I worked with a Chinese student once. No, I’m not going to give his name.
They could always defect, but then their family will catch all manner of heck (avoiding more appropriate words.) As bad as what happens to the family of North Korean defectors.
Always wondered why US higher ed opened the doors like this. All they saw was $$$.
As Lenin is often quoted in paraphrase, “The capitalists will sell us the rope we will use to hang them.”
(He didn’t actually say this, but it is a colloquial paraphrase of something he did say: “They [capitalists] will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party… by supplying us materials and technical equipment … they will work on the preparation of their own suicide.”)
Universities, Democrats and Federal Judges will be outraged!
Fortunately for the U, D and FJ crowd, changing anything Biden did is unconstitutional.
No, the only “pipeline” it might disrupt is the flow of stolen proprietary intellectual property and research from universities and businesses that employ Chinese nationals holding work and/or education visas.
It’s funny how Reuters always takes the side of anything except the safety and security of the US.
Reuters has been a suck a** “news” source for decades.
Why should they? They’re Canadian.
They can report the news without a slant towards any one side.
We can’t even get that from “our own” media. Expecting it from someone else’s is insanity.
why cant american students do the top jobs?
is it b/c after decades of constant bombardment by the lefty gov controlled public school system kids believe THEY CANT!!??
as several blue cities PUSH FOR THE GRADE OF 40 TO BE CONSIDERED A PASSING GRADE the
“UPLIFTING” OF BLACK STUDENTS AT THE EXPENSE OF COMMON SENSE AND REALITY has led to this
so that others wont feel bad,,the rest of us have to lose so they can “win”
thats the only real brain drain
There should be an outright ban on chinese students in STEM fields. They are spies one and most.
There should also be a ban on outsourcing. My startup company outsourced some development and support to a chinese company effectively giving them our patented technology. Insane. No protections exist.
As for whether US citizens can do the work I would say yes. I would say the problem is American companies don’t want to hire them because they are
not anywhere as controllable as H1b visa holders and not as cheap. Frankly I’ve never been terribly impressed by most Indian and chinese tech workers I ran across while working. Most have been ok. A few indians were excellent. Americans were always more talented and especially innovative. Perhaps that has changed in the last 10 years since I’ve been out of the work force.
We should limit the number of Chinese students to be equal to the number of Americans studying in China.
They don’t deserve to have any more of their people here than we do of our people over there.
Currently there are 700 american students studying in china. Pre-covid there were 15k
“It’s amazing that we have not taken steps to address this before now.”
It’s amazing that we elected a clinically brain-dead president, whose son received lucrative
bribescontracts from the PRC.Accept it — we just live in amazing times.
“We elected a clinically brain-dead president”
I’m trying to think what best describes the clinically brain-dead president:
a. Help! I’ve fallen down and can’t get up.
b. Frankenstein’s reassembled man had a healthier brain.
c. They don’t make brains like they used to.
d. Jill was the brains of the Biden clan.
e. Champ, Major, and Commander were the brains of the Biden clan.
And all took big bites out of the nation’s robks.
The Commissar Judges are not going to like that.
Can we finally take a look at the $60,000,000 that the Chinese donated to Biden’s UPenn thing. The place he kept a bunch of classified documents?