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.
Reuters reports:
US says it will start revoking visas for Chinese studentsU.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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