Tom Cotton incited internet ire after discussing Chinese nationals studying at U.S. universities on Sunday Morning Futures. He proposed restrictions on Chinese nationals’ ability to study STEM majors.
“It’s a scandal to me that we have trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party’s brightest minds to go back to China to compete for our jobs, to take our business, and ultimately to steal our property and design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people,” Cotton said. “So, I think we need to take a very hard look at the visas that we give the Chinese nationals to come to the United States to study, especially at the post-graduate level in advanced scientific and technological fields. If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.”
You can gripe with the practicality or precedent of the Arkansas senator’s proposed solution to the problem, but his diagnosis is correct and eminently defensible.
The F-1 visa program, which permits foreign nationals to study in the U.S. full time and comprises the overwhelming majority of our student visas, is extraordinarily lax, approving roughly 4 out of 5 applicants. More than a quarter-million, a plurality of the 644,233 F-1 visas issued in 2015, went to mainland Chinese nationals. Four out of 5 Chinese nationals who study at U.S. universities now return to their communist country permanently, so this isn’t an immigration issue.
You don’t have to be an immigration hawk (and in fact, this isn’t really an immigration issue) to see why this is a catastrophe in the making.
It’s one thing to welcome students from abroad who either already embrace liberal democratic values or want to do so. It’s entirely another to facilitate the use of our institutions of higher learning against us and our national security by a communist regime that is actively trying to supplant U.S. and democratic interests worldwide.
It’s hard to imagine how the pure logistics of Cotton’s plans would materialize. There’s even a case to be made that our F-1 visa program should be modified to mandate or at least encourage F-1 graduates to stay in the U.S. after graduation. But there’s no question that the conversation about our student visa program that most heavily rewards enemy and anti-democratic nations is long overdue.
