Republican lawmakers push bill seeking to ban Chinese nationals from studying in the US

A group of House Republicans on Friday put forward legislation seeking to prevent Chinese students from studying in American schools, as some U.S. lawmakers are targeting China over national security concerns.

Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., introduced the bill that could bar Chinese nationals from receiving visas that allow foreigners to travel to the U.S. to study or participate in exchange visitor programs. Five other Republicans co-sponsored the measure.

By granting Chinese nationals such visas, the U.S. has “invited” the Chinese Communist Party “to spy on our military, steal our intellectual property, and threaten national security,” Moore said in a statement. “It’s time we turn off the spigot and immediately ban all student visas going to Chinese nationals.”

The measure is unlikely to pass, and it has drawn criticism from organizations and scholars over concerns that hostile policies and rhetoric toward Chinese students could hurt U.S. interests.

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“No policy should target individuals solely on the basis of their national origin,” Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA, an association of international educators, said in a statement.

“Making international students — the most vetted and tracked nonimmigrants in the United States — a scapegoat for xenophobic and anti-Chinese sentiment is misguided and antithetical to our national interest,” Aw said.

Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said China “expresses strong concern and firmly opposes such practices.” He said education exchange and cooperation has long served as a pillar for the stable development of China-U.S. relations.

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The Asian American Scholars Forum said such legislation would harm the talent pipeline of Asian American scientists, scholars and researchers, undermining U.S. leadership in science and innovation.

Despite the bill’s slim chance of getting approved, Yangyang Cheng, research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said the bill “should be seen as part of a broader effort to restrict academic freedom and hurt higher education in this country, to control what can be taught, which research projects can be pursued, and who have access to the classrooms and laboratories.”

In the 2023-24 school year, more than 277,000 Chinese students were studying in U.S. universities, or a quarter of the total number of international students, according to an annual report on international students from the Institute of International Education. The number of Chinese students in the U.S., however, has been declining for years. Last year, China lost its status to India as the top feeder country of international students.

In 2023, Florida passed a law prohibiting state universities from hiring students from China and six other countries for graduate assistant and postdoc positions., and it’s been challenged in court. Several U.S. universities have ended academic partnerships with Chinese schools amid mounting pressure from Republican lawmakers over national security concerns.

Reactions on China’s social media to the new legislation were varied. Some who said they had recently received offers from American schools expressed concerns, some dismissed it as “a political show,” and some called it “another Chinese Exclusion Act.”