What follows, in my view, is a glaring microcosm of the deleterious effect that shadowy special interests exert in Washington D.C. — and the poor arguments that attempt to justify them.
Insofar as public sentiment matters at all at the granular policy level — a dubious proposition — this dog isn’t going to hunt.
As you might be aware, much to the bewilderment of a huge portion of the MAGA base, President Trump recently announced that the State Department would be issuing visas to 600,000 Chinese students to attend American universities.
Via NBC News (emphasis added):
Ahead of his meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung at the White House on Monday, Trump told reporters that he plans to allow 600,000 Chinese students into the country — a figure more than double the number in the United States now.
“We’re going to get along good with China. I hear so many stories about ‘We’re not going to allow their students’” to come in, Trump said. “We’re going to allow, it’s very important, 600,000 students. It’s very important.”
It’s a sharp departure from an announcement Secretary of State Marco Rubio made in May, when he promised the United States would “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students and add more scrutiny to all future visa applications from China.
Presumably because of blowback to the proposal, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick hit the media circuit to clean up the mess.
Imagine offering this argument with a straight face:
Well, 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 the students would go up to better schools, and the bottom 15% of universities and colleges would go out of business in America.
Ingraham: "How is allowing 600K students from China putting America First? Those are 600K spots that American kids won't get."
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) August 26, 2025
Commerce Sec. Lutnick: "If you didn't have those 600K students, the bottom 15% of colleges would go out of business." pic.twitter.com/isSqsV0iLb
In other words, the point of importing 600,000 Chinese students is to use them as a tool to displace American students from higher-echelon American universities, so that they’ll be forced to go to lesser state schools to prevent them from going belly-up.
America First!
Potential other solutions, modestly proposed:
- Educate native students better and inspire them to go to universities;
- If there must be 600,000 more foreign students, bring them in from allied countries rather than China;
- Not care about elite private universities (which have endowments in the billions of dollars) and not cater to their interests using foreign policy.
Related: Chinese Communist Party Literally Names Its Domestic Surveillance Program 'Skynet'
In all fairness to Lutnick, there is no decent argument for importing north of half a million foreign students from a hostile country, which no nation outside of the West would ever allow to happen. So that’s probably the best he could feasibly come up with.
I don’t know anyone on the right, or anyone with common sense for that matter, who thinks that importing Chinese students by the hundreds of thousands — impossible to vet in that number, with some proportion guaranteed to be CCP spies in search of intellectual property to steal and espionage to conduct — and dumping them in American universities as a business strategy to prop them up is a great idea.
