Lawmakers from both parties agree that the Chinese government has pressured some Chinese students in the United States to collect information, and that those engaged in sensitive research may pose serious security risks.
But Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement this week that the Trump administration will “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students” raised alarms among Democratic lawmakers and some China policy experts, who fear a brain drain out of the U.S. would only play into the Chinese government’s hands.
“This is a pattern with Trump: He identifies an issue, then responds with reckless overreach that ends up hurting America,” Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who sits on the House select committee on competition with the Chinese government, said in a statement.
“There are real national security risks in STEM fields that should demand targeted action,” he said. “But banning all Chinese-national students throws away one of our greatest strengths — that top global talent still wants to study and stay in the U.S.”
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the select committee on competition, described the administration’s related desire to broadly freeze any new student visa interviews as “reckless.”
“International students help drive cutting-edge research, fuel our universities and build the industries of tomorrow,” he said.
Rubio’s announcement about revoking visas focused on students with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or those doing research in critical fields, but its wording suggested the revocations could go beyond that. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce on Thursday wouldn’t share the specifics of “the scrutiny and the methods regarding the visa itself.”
But America “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,” she said during a press conference.
Espionage and transnational repression are real concerns: The FBI in October charged five Chinese nationals who graduated from the University of Michigan with espionage after they allegedly took pictures of military equipment while the Michigan Army National Guard was training Taiwanese forces during an exercise.
Chinese students have also described facing intimidation from their own government while living in America. During a House select committee on competition meeting with students in 2023, one Chinese student at a U.S. university said Chinese security officials had visited his parents back home in China after he made a Facebook event page for a vigil commemorating the CCP’s 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters.
His parents called him to tell him the officials had urged him to delete the event page. He said he feared returning to China after their visit to his family’s home.
Members of Congress have emphasized the difference between Chinese students who are here to do research and prepare for their futures and those who may be engaged in malicious activity. Last year, there were about 277,000 Chinese students in the United States.
“It’s really important to constantly draw that distinction between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people,” then-Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who chaired the select committee on competition before retiring last year, said during the committee’s meeting with students. “It is a strategy by the CCP to collapse that distinction.”
Now, some China policy experts fear the Trump administration is actively collapsing the distinction between the CCP and Chinese students.
Ryan Fedasiuk, a former adviser for U.S-China affairs at the State Department and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, said in an interview that the announcement’s phrasing “makes the United States look like an antagonist in its bilateral relationship with China and actually vindicates a lot of CCP talking points about U.S. xenophobia.”
“Certainly there have been cases where Chinese students in the United States have been implicated in intelligence collection, IP theft and censorship and harassment on college campuses,” he continued. “But the bottom line is that the overwhelming majority of Chinese students do not engage in these activities.”
“The fact that U.S. faculty members are able to collaborate with ease with almost any scientist in the world is the envy of foreign governments, friend and foe,” Fedasiuk said. “Smart strategic planners and policymakers in China know that the United States restricting Chinese student access will benefit China in the long term. And they are actually excited that the United States has taken this step.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, has pushed for more Chinese students to stay in the United States to work after graduating, contributing to America’s tech development rather than bringing their skills back to China. Other Republicans are far more skeptical of those arguments.
Vice President JD Vance dismissed concerns this week about a potential brain drain.
“If you go back to the ’50s and ’60s, the American space program — the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon — was built by American citizens,” he told Newsmax in an interview. “Some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who built an incredible space program with American talent.”
“This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things? I just reject that,” he said.
Those foreign scientists were central during the space race: German rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun developed the Saturn V rocket that launched American astronauts to the moon. He and a team of foreign scientists — many of whom had worked with the Nazis during World War II — came to America as part of a secretive government talent-recruitment operation in the leadup to the Cold War.
As tensions ratcheted up between America and the Soviet Union, diplomats and officials also viewed educational exchange programs as a powerful tool to promote the American way of life. Wilson Compton, an administrator of the International Information Administration, wrote in a State Department magazine in October 1952 that allowing international students to do research in America could “orient former enemy nations to democracy.”
China hawks still see that argument as compelling, as they believe a second Cold War is underway.
“On balance, we want the Chinese people to come see America for themselves,” said Michael Sobolik, a former GOP congressional staffer who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He thinks more scrutiny of student visas is necessary and could be a positive step — if officials execute it with precision.
“If they deport and revoke visas for known espionage folks and people who are working with the embassy and the consulates, amazing,” Sobolik said. “Kick them out as soon as you can. If these are people in sensitive research industries and sensitive sectors, like STEM in particular, I am really sympathetic to the argument that that’s just too much of a risk, especially if they have party and PLA connections.”
But, “we should still keep avenues open for Chinese nationals to come here on student visas,” he said. “It’s good for us if they witness life in America and see what freedom looks like, not only because they don’t have freedom in China, but in the Cold War that was one of our biggest assets.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.