Remember when JD Vance said that the U.S. should stop allowing foreign students to study here so that good American kids could take their places? That seemed to be the administration’s line what with the deportations, visa requirements and university shakedowns and all. Well, this week, Trump abruptly announced that they’re going to allow 600,000 Chinese students a year (doubling the current number) to study here and all hell broke loose.
Will Sommer at the Bulwark
MAGA world is in revolt over Donald Trump’s promise to grant visas to 600,000 Chinese students to study in the United States. It’s gotten so bad that the tensions are starting to rival those that erupted between the president and his base when he tried to shut down the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.[…]
Why would they think that? In part because key figures inside Trump world have been making that case for years—including early in this administration when Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially moved to revoke Chinese student visas.
On the right, it has become an article of faith that international students are taking the college spots they feel should be going to disaffected young native-born Americans and that H-1B visa recipients are crowding them out of tech jobs. Amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on Harvard’s international student visas, for example, right-wing media outlets told their audiences that nearly all American university seats should go to Americans.
So it’s caused no shortage of anger and confusion that Trump would now do a 180 and bring in even more Chinese students. The announcement was universally panned on the right by a wide range of Trump allies, from Steve Bannon to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to “Libs of TikTok.” Tim Pool’s show dubbed it a “MAGA uproar,” with one guest saying it undermined the strength of the administration’s deportation arguments. This was an issue where even archenemies Laura Loomer and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) found common ground, both saying it was a disaster.
“They get those seats, Americans don’t,” white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes said.
Perhaps the highest-profile pushback has come from Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “How is allowing 600,000 students from the Communist country of China putting America first?” Ingraham asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday.
Lutnick, no stranger to making situations worse with his bumbling cable-news appearances, essentially said that Chinese students have to be allowed into the country in order to subsidize low-performing American colleges.
“The president’s point of view is that what would happen if you didn’t have those 600,000 students is that you’d empty them from the top, all of those students would go up to better schools, and the bottom 15 percent of universities and colleges would go out of business in America,” Lutnick said.
Soundslike a winning issue to me.
This all came about because a reporter asked about it and Trump just threw out the number which no one had ever heard before. It’s what he does. And anyway:
The New York Times reported, “It is a little late to be beckoning international students to enroll. The fall semester is beginning at many schools and the message seemed to contradict steps the administration has taken to make it more difficult for students, including those from China, to enter and study in the United States.”
It’s hard to see Trump backing down from this publicly because he doesn’t do that and he was very specific. (Whether they actually do it is another thing — he doesn’t care about actual policy.) Stay tuned.