In the midst of a flurry of federal-policy changes and threatened crackdowns on international students, Chinese students, in particular, are victims of whiplash.
First they heard that the Trump administration would begin “aggressively” revoking their visas. Then the president appeared to walk that back, saying, according to reports on his trade negotiations with China, that Chinese students would be welcome in the United States.
“It does seem that Chinese students are being used as bargaining chips in the trade negotiations with China,” said Jonathan Bean, a research fellow at the Independent Institute and a professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
Chinese students have been used as political pawns before. As policies are announced and rescinded, the uncertainty alone can take a toll. And the damage — not just to individual students but to higher education and the technological competitiveness of the United States — may be long-lasting.
“We risk losing top global talent if international students believe their visas can be arbitrarily revoked or that they may not be able to complete their degree,” the National Asian American Coalition wrote in a June 13 letter opposing the policy.
A History of Suspicion
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on May 28 that the United States would begin to “aggressively revoke” visas from Chinese students “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”
Though “critical fields” remains undefined, Rubio’s statement followed a letter sent by the House Select Committee on China to six research universities alleging that Chinese spies were embedding themselves into U.S. STEM programs.
The entire model of how universities run in the U.S. is at risk if we lose the supply of international students.
During the 2023-24 academic year, 277,398 Chinese students were studying in the United States, according to data from Open Doors. Of those, 122,778 were graduate students, primarily in STEM disciplines.
The U.S. visa system encourages prospective international students to pursue a STEM degree. Those students can tack on a 24-month extension to the extra year they get through the Optional Practical Training provision of their F-1 visa, which allows them to stay and work after graduating. Nearly half of the 194,554 international students on an OPT work authorization in 2024 obtained it through the STEM OPT.
When Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education, first saw Rubio’s statement, she thought of a similar policy enacted during the first Trump administration.
That policy, or Presidential Proclamation 10043, instituted a ban on Chinese graduate students studying in “fields of concern” and who hold ties to organizations deemed a threat to national security interests. That proclamation was more narrowly tailored than Rubio’s May 28 announcement, which includes all Chinese students, not just graduate students.
The government provided a briefing on Presidential Proclamation 10043 after the American Council on Education requested additional information on how it would be applied. But the government never disclosed specific “fields of concern” or provided a list of flagged organizations, saying that naming them publicly could itself create a national security risk, according to Spreitzer. More than 1,000 Chinese graduate-student visas were revoked, and an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Chinese students affected — most of them graduate students.
Presidential Proclamation 10043 remains in effect today. The Biden administration left it alone, even as it publicly dismantled the China Initiative, a broader Trump-era program that targeted alleged foreign espionage in the U.S. research enterprise.
Started in 2018, the China Initiative did not explicitly mention Chinese students or researchers at U.S. universities. But the majority of people targeted in the 77 cases the Department of Justice publicized were of Chinese descent, according to a December 2021 MIT Technology Review report. Researchers and scholars were often charged in grand public proceedings before having their cases quietly dropped before trial due to lack of evidence.
Though the China Initiative was shut down in 2022, critics warned of long-term consequences to U.S. research efforts and of a chilling effect on Chinese and Asian American researchers.
Those consequences were stark. The departure of Chinese scientists who had been based in the United States increased by 75 percent during the program’s enforcement, with two-thirds of them relocating to China, according to a report from the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. Joint publications between Chinese and American scientists declined.
By targeting established scholars, the China Initiative created “a severe chilling effect” on young Asian Americans who saw well-established scholars and researchers “face such severe scrutiny and unjust tests of loyalty by the federal government in the country that they consider home,” said Gisela Perez Kusakawa, executive director of the Asian-American Scholar Forum.
Revoking visas from Chinese students similarly disrupts that talent pipeline. Chinese students, said Kusakawa, contribute significantly to emerging critical fields, such as artificial intelligence. Of the top AI scientists who studied in China and now live outside the country, 75 percent live in the United States, she said.
“It’s not only a loss for the Asian American community,” Kusakawa said. “It’s a loss for the whole American community.”
In recent years, new legislation, such as the 2025 “Stop CCP VISAs Act” introduced in the House of Representatives in March, has attempted to revive the China Initiative and to issue a blanket ban on Chinese students.
‘It Would Be Devastating’
Now, colleges are grappling with a possible escalation of policies from the previous Trump administration. Experts say the policies imperil U.S. technological research and global competitiveness.
They also say the policies threaten college operations. Shellen Xiao Wu, a chair in transnational history and director of the Humanities Center at Lehigh University, stressed the crucial role STEM graduate students play in their universities’ research endeavors.
“It would be devastating. You really can’t run labs without these graduate students. You really can’t run these large courses,” said Wu. “The entire model of how universities run in the U.S. is at risk if we lose the supply of international students.”
Given their different educational backgrounds, graduate and postdoctoral students also provide fresh perspectives as research collaborators and as mentors for undergraduate students, said Dawen Cai, an associate professor of biophysics at the University of Michigan Medical School.
“They are an irreplaceable brick for the foundation of this whole building of technology and science,” Cai said.
When the Chinese students, especially the best minds in STEM fields, realize that they could be the subjects of this aggressive effort to revoke the student visas, they will choose not to come.
And they do “a lot of the foundational work that’s required to produce really good research,” said Cole McFaul, a senior research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
The center has published multiple reports on the impact of U.S. policies involving China, including one that shows that more than 90 percent of Chinese STEM doctoral students remain in the United States after completing their studies. According to that report, 91 percent of Chinese students studying artificial intelligence remain in the country for at least five years — the time frame the report covers, meaning that many probably stayed for longer.
Several faculty members noted that, in economic terms, education is one of the country’s best products. Universities are “one of the great export industries of the United States. And it brings in a lot of foreign business,” said Gabriel Chin, a professor of law and director of clinical legal education at the University of California at Davis.
“I’m a law professor. I’m not developing new drugs, but I benefit from them,” Chin said. “And if we were to say, ‘We don’t really want people from the outside, we’re not really open to different opinions, we’re not really interested in people who do things differently from the way we already want to do them,’ we are killing the goose that has laid golden eggs for a couple hundred years.”
Chinese students, and international students more broadly, also contribute critical tuition dollars to their universities. Since they usually pay the full cost, that money “is helping to subsidize the education of American students,” said Emily Baum, an associate professor of history at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in modern Chinese history.
In her state, “if you take that away, then it’s unclear how many of the California residents will be able to afford the education,” Baum said. At UC Irvine, in-state tuition was $15,722 for the 2024-25 academic year. Out-of-state students paid over three times as much, at $49,922.
Even though Trump distanced himself in a social-media post from Rubio’s statement, the damage may have been done.
Wu, of Lehigh, and others have heard of programs losing top students to universities in Hong Kong and European countries, including Britain, France, and Germany. Given the “huge investment” students must make to uproot their lives and move to a new country, they could be hesitant to commit to American programs, she said.
“When the Chinese students, especially the best minds in STEM fields, realize that they could be the subjects of this aggressive effort to revoke the student visas, they will choose not to come,” said Yanzhong Huang, a professor and director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University.
‘They Don’t Feel Welcome Anymore’
On May 30, the American Council on Education sent a letter to Rubio on behalf of 38 higher-education organizations requesting a brief on recent executive policies targeting international students, including the revocation of Chinese student visas. The organization hasn’t gotten a reply, except a confirmation that the letter was received, said Spreitzer.
When a new administration enters the White House, Spreitzer said, ACE communicates that, though “we are partners with them in addressing national security concerns,” international students should be welcomed.
“International students, the vast majority of them that are coming here to study, have no underhanded reasons for applying for a student visa,” Spreitzer said. “They really need certainty when it comes to the status of their student visa.”
A rising sophomore from China at the University of Southern California, who asked not to be named because of fears his visa could be revoked, said that “people are worried about” their statuses after seeing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detentions in Los Angeles and the Trump administration’s calls to revoke Chinese student visas. He’s working at a finance internship in the United States this summer, in part to avoid leaving the country and risk being refused entry in the fall.
He said that he was planning to get his driver’s license and buy a car, but has shelved those plans after seeing posts on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social-media platform, of students having their visas revoked for minor infractions like traffic violations.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, some of his family members and friends in the United States experienced a surge in anti-Chinese hate, exacerbated by comments President Trump made, such as calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus.” Though he has not personally faced that kind of hostility, he worries he might in the future.
“There’s nothing much I can do,” he said. “I just pray that for the next term, he’s not going to be in office, and that’s all I can do.”
Huang, of Seton Hall, said that back in the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese students and scholars felt welcome entering the United States to pursue their education. But now, he’s heard that students are afraid of being stuck in xiǎo hēi wū, which directly translates to “little black room” and refers to airport inspection rooms where some students entering the United States have been held for hours of questioning.
“They don’t feel welcome anymore.”
