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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20303 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rubio-says-us-will-start-revoking-visas-chinese-students-2025-05-28/

WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday the United States will start "aggressively" revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.

If applied to a broad segment of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese university students in the United States, the move could disrupt a major source of income for American schools and a crucial pipeline of talent for U.S. technology companies.

President Donald Trump's administration has sought to ramp up deportations and revoke student visas as part of wide-ranging efforts to fulfill its hardline immigration agenda. In a statement, Rubio said the State Department will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from China and Hong Kong.

"The U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students," he said.

To what extent is this foreign/defense policy, and to what extent is this a fig leaf for prior CW against higher education and foreign students? Shouldn't we be trying to deprive the PRC of human capital? Being anti-CCP, I'm concerned about stuff like this, but a "to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students," where "Chinese student" is the only criteria given by the Secretary of State doesn't seem like a good idea.

Edit: A longer quote of Rubio, via Politico (???):

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” he said in a statement. “We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”

If anything, this just seems dumber - why is it "Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields," rather than "Those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party, regardless of citizenship?"

Noah Smith makes a good case that international students are good, but it's paywalled. However, here's a quote answering the question of whether foreign students displace or subsidize native students:

All this tuition money from international students allows American universities to pay for more spots for domestic students. In fact, you can see this effect in action. Shih (2017) looked at the effects of various exogenous shocks — baby booms in foreign countries that led to more international enrollment in the 90s, and then 9/11, when increased suspicion of international students led to a sudden drop in enrollment. He found that when more international kids attended a U.S. university, the number of spots for American students also rose:

I focus on a dramatic increase in international enrollment at U.S. graduate programs during the late 1990s, which suddenly reversed following heightened scrutiny of student visa applications in the aftermath of 9/11…The primary findings reveal that international students actually raise domestic enrollment. Preferred estimates indicate that 10 additional international students increase domestic enrollment by roughly 8…This positive effect also appears during the bust period…

At the margin universities can charge international students high prices and use the profits to subsidize the cost of enrolling more domestic students…I provide multiple forms of evidence that indicate cross-subsidization underlies the crowd-in effects. The positive impacts appear to be driven by foreign Master's students, who pay full-sticker price tuition…[T]he positive impacts are concentrated on domestic graduate students in academic programs, who require subsidies…[T]he crowd-in effects are most pronounced among public universities which prioritize enrolling domestic students, pricing tuition below cost for state residents, while also charging foreign students tuition rates between 2 and 3 times higher.

If you were to kick out all of America’s 1.1 million international students, Shih’s estimate would suggest that domestic enrollment would fall by 800,000. Even if it were only half or a quarter of that, that’s a substantial number of Americans who wouldn’t get the chance to go to college.

And the burden would fall hardest on state schools, for whom the difference in tuition between foreign and domestic students is highest, and who have already suffered the most from funding cuts. State schools are much more important for uplifting the American working class into the middle class than Harvard or MIT. So by kicking out international students, Trump is depriving the working class of life-changing educational opportunities.

There is certainly espionage happening that needs to be dealt with, but the wording of the announcement would seem to indicate that implementation of this policy will, like most things to come out of this administration, be indiscriminate, haphazard, amateurish, and probably lead to a worse outcome than if nothing had been done at all. If anyone thinks we can win a cold war against China without immigrant brainpower, they are out of their minds. However smart you think white kids from the midwest are, they aren't going to become ubermenschen who are worth 4 Chinese apiece just because we banned affirmative action and are kicking out all the international students.

If anyone thinks we can win a cold war against China without immigrant brainpower, they are out of their minds.

Depending on the amount of espionage we could in fact and quite confidently say we would win if we blocked Chinese nationals from all US STEM.

Wet streets don't cause rain, and top-ranked schools don't cause good students. If China didn't need our schools, their nationals wouldn't be here. If those Chinese geniuses are making such great contributions, they wouldn't have been let out of the country. There is an alternative explanation, which I'll address in a moment.

There were 76 million people in the US circa 1900 and they were 88% white. The American Empire followed, and it wasn't Chinese students building it. We did have a glut of Jewish talent but if anything the peak of our Empire was smaller than it would have been as their contribution was hastening the inevitable that was American victory.

There are twice as many whites in this country now, so we can also confidently say that just given a larger population there must be far more geniuses and far more overlooked geniuses. This relates to the alternative explanation, which is China does sequester their best and brightest, but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.

Anymore, be it either true success from China or paper success, there is no reason for their nationals to be allowed continued participation in US STEM. I do agree this plan will be haphazard and amateurish, but not truly indiscriminate, as their nationals in US STEM should be indiscriminately and unceremoniously expelled to the last. But we could reach a happy medium with reciprocity: they can have, given the difference in populations, 1 student in our schools for every 5 we have in theirs.

but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.

How do you square this with the top level comment's economic argument that on net, foreign students' tuition results in over half a million more domestic students enrolling than in the counterfactual?

America in 1900 had open borders with the entire world except for China, and the Chinese Exclusion Act had an exception for an unlimited number of Chinese students. In fact, starting in 1908 the US government even used the money it got from China in the Boxer Indemnity to pay for the education of Chinese students in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Indemnity_Scholarship

The politicians of 1908 America wanted to keep America white, but they didn't share the zero-sum chud mindset that a Chinese getting an education is the reason your cousin Trevor is working at Wal-Mart.

Yeah, what happened in China after that? With all that American-educated Elite Human Capital™ the country must have flourished.

Oh, right.

The quasi-westernized person of color raises hackles at the truth because his world swings upon the selective white humility he doesn't recognize as racism. Those WASP "EHCs" are sadistically racist, they're just so good at obfuscating it the person of color, only familiar with the boorish sort of racism from his countrymen, mistakes it for humility. Every measure of their ostensible praise is patronization, you cannot sing in their peculiar timbre the delights of folks of color without feeling to the marrow that infinite satisfaction in certainty of superiority at being born white. The most belligerent Xitter 1488-er can't begin to apprehend such intrinsic belief in white supremacy. I'll hold up my media literacy certificate and put on my serious hat, have you seen the movie Get Out? It's 104 minutes of literally this point. I digress. He knows the boorish racism and he conflates it with what he sees in America, not as substantive argument but as an appeal to aesthetic and a subconscious plea to mother and father WASP EHC to intervene. Unfortunately for him, though fortunately for greater discourse, the surging right no longer cares about being impugned by aesthetic.

I myself, as an enlightened centrist, never cared.

So you bring out the typical and lazy responses. "Cousin Trevor" or "Cousin Billy Bob" no, it's not the pejorative strawmen about people in very blue-collar occupations or the perpetually unemployed indolent who would have a spot at MIT if only they kept out foreigners. It's about what we know for a fact:

  1. All compulsory American education is weighted against white male students

  2. All non-vocational institutions of higher learning in the US are weighted against white male students

  3. All STEM employment in the US is weighted against white male applicants

  4. And I'll throw in a corollary #4, US corporations hire vast numbers of Indians because, chiefly, it's the closest thing to legal slavery

Nobody is saying the physics genius with a special understanding of reality is being kept out. Men of such stature are defined by their persistence in the face of adversity, they will get in, whatever it takes. What we are saying is most men don't know their calling, they choose a career and it becomes their calling. There are men who feel no calling to medicine but who would have made superb surgeons, same with civil engineers or simply as research assistants. But they've gone through #1 and they're in the process or they've finished #2 and they see #3 rushing toward them and they choose a field or employer where the hostility of modernity toward them appears least present. 70 years ago a bunch of men weren't doing nothing, "twiddling their thumbs" while they waited for Computer Science to exist. They chose among the options they had, and now there are many options.

Here's a question, how many South and East Asians now work at Microsoft? Here's another question, what's going on with Windows 11?

Oh. Oh God.

Fuck me, look at the output of that Elite Human Capital™!

I wonder why white guys might second-guess a job at Microsoft. Aside from knowing they'll have to make it through the gauntlet of interviews where, again, the policy is "Come up with literally any reason possible to not hire white men." In the rarity they do get hired, their reward is working with and for South Asians, Indians, who will only promote other Indians. "They should just deal with it." No, they just take low-visible-prestige jobs in small outfits and regional corporations with comparable compensation given massively lower costs of living and real estate. And some of them are unspecific geniuses, because there are more than 350 million people in this country and even at third sigma above that's quite a few. They didn't all go to Ivies, and they aren't all in STEM.

You know what else? Some of those Americans, all of them not just the geniuses, will have lost spots at universities in favor of Chinese or Indian or whatever other country's nationals, and I can provide you the exact number of acceptable instances for that to happen, the country over, totaling every student at every institution: zero.

America exists for Americans. If a Chinese national good enough on academic merit for Harvard wants to come here, renounce his citizenship, and pledge to help us root out CCP spies, by all means take him. Pay for everything, give him a pile of gold, we want him, he is elite. Objectively, for a university to take a Chinese national over an American and provide them with qualifications they take back home is a cost that will not be recouped. That is the rule, we do benefit from elite talent coming to this country as long as they stay. The experiment of taking in foreign nationals and sending them out with an American education in some hope of our later benefit has been an empiric failure. For decades almost every aspiring Mexican Technocrat got a US education, shall we check in on how we've both benefited?

(I'll let you imagine the cartel-chainsawed corpses.)

I will compliment you, though. By commenting here you prove yourself more astute than Hanania. He is a person who is notable in this sphere solely for being notable. He was relatively early on X, and that is the only compliment he could get from me, because if he fielded his ideas here first they would be trashed, because he did field them here years ago and they were trashed. I would trust him quoting you over you quoting him. The follower count is no endorsement, EHC knows this, many such cases.

What is the evidence that admitting foreign students is taking spots away from domestic students, rather than subsidizing them as Noah Smith claims? Why should we even be trying to increase the enrollment of (normie) white students when all making college education quasi-compulsory has done is inflate the minimum credentials needed to get a decent job and waste a bunch of people's time and money? It has never been easier to get an education in whatever subject you want on your own or start your own company, so to say that the weak (by world standards) form of discrimination that white students face in school is depriving them of opportunities they need to make something of themselves seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Their ancestors, the generation that produced all the marvelous inventions that underpin modern life, had it far harder. They couldn't study electrical or chemical engineering or computer science because they had to go out and invent those fields from scratch themselves, after spending their childhoods translating Latin in unventilated schoolhouses. The only thing students today want for is purpose, and that is not something that tinkering with college admissions is going to resolve.

As for the value of educating foreigners who do not intend to stay, it consists chiefly in the spread of liberal American values to the elite of neutral or enemy nations, destabilizing governments that are hostile to us and creating a naturally pro-American constituency and reserve of goodwill that can be drawn from in the event of a geopolitical crisis. We are also implicitly holding the children of high officials in China, South Korea, India, etc. hostage should a conflict develop with their home countries. In medieval times, you usually had to beat sombody in a war to get that kind of deal, but today they come here willingly.

Some of those Americans, all of them not just the geniuses, will have lost spots at universities in favor of Chinese or Indian or whatever other country's nationals

Again, zero-sum fallacy.

overlooked geniuses

We wuz kangs and sheet.

More effort and less…sneering? Mockery? Than this, please.

There were 76 million people in the US circa 1900 and they were 88% white. The American Empire followed, and it wasn't Chinese students building it. We did have a glut of Jewish talent but if anything the peak of our Empire was smaller than it would have been as their contribution was hastening the inevitable that was American victory.

The gulf between the West and the Rest was greater then.

Some nations may not have come as far as they think but China definitely isn't one of them. Even if we do the whole DR special pleading thing and assume that Asiatic bugmen are worth less than one intrepid Western autistic genius no matter what the overall IQ score says , no one can deny that China has the numbers, at least close human capital, and doesn't seem to be doing badly enough that Western quality is guaranteed a win.

Thé US population is also far older than it was at the peak of the empire and can’t afford to be turning away talented youngsters to maintain its edge.

Obviously I don’t know how many of these youngsters are ‘talented’ vs ‘cheating’, and how many of them are spies, but brain drain is a tried and tested way of keeping empires afloat.

Were those empires successful in maintaining their empire with foreign brains?

It would seem the better plan would be

We are not about to send bring American Asian boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian American boys ought to be doing for themselves.

The Romans and the Ottomans certainly were. Hell, Egypt was run by Circassians for centuries and the elite of Tsarist Russia was disproportionately Volga German. An empire by definition consists of multiple peoples without a common ethnic heritage, so all this nationalist talk of "foreign brains" would be alien to them.

If you're using the latter ottoman and tsarist empires as your models, that's kinda telling. Neither was a particularly fantastic place to live, were intellectually and culturally stagnant, and were so politically unstable they suffered fairly frequent and serious revolutionary insurrections.

Yes because they were part of the empire.

I'm not sure importing Chinese students really makes them part of the empire.

If we're looking to the Roman example how well did it work out with Arminius?

Yes because they were part of the empire.

I'm not sure importing Chinese students really makes them part of the empire.

Chinese-Americans have been part of the empire since the 1850's, longer than Italians, Poles, or Jews.

If we're looking to the Roman example how well did it work out with Arminius?

The Romans system worked for over four centuries (taking the Social War as the starting point) far longer than any of us expect the American one to, individual cases of betrayal aside.

There were Jews in America in the 1700s.

I don't think anyone is talking about excluding Chinese-Americans.

The topic was Chinese from China.

I don't expect us to have the determination to last over four centuries, we'll skip directly to the betrayal.

The high-IQ American boys you think are twiddling their thumbs because Chang took their college spot and job don't exist. Unemployment is low and the non-employed are mostly low human capital who don't feel like working.

What American boys? AFAIK American boys are mostly achieving except for those at the bottom- you’d need more American boys to match. Good luck convincing the girl next door to breed.

If those Chinese geniuses are making such great contributions, they wouldn't have been let out of the country

Consider that countries are subject to pressures other than maximising innovation. Letting internationally-minded high-openness intellectuals out could be a win-win proposition for China and the recipient: the target country gets to capture their intellectual output, while China is rid of someone who would make trouble/destabilise the system/gets to evaporatively cool its citizenry into relative complacency.

There are twice as many whites in this country now, so we can also confidently say that just given a larger population there must be far more geniuses and far more overlooked geniuses. This relates to the alternative explanation, which is China does sequester their best and brightest, but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.

What is the mechanism by which a Chinese student at a US university (who pays higher tuition than the average native, especially the average native at risk of being "overlooked") reduces opportunities for Americans? From what I have seen, the default seems to be that in STEM, without being subsidised by Chinese non-research MA students, the programmes from BA through PhD would be untenable at their current cost/expense level.

What is the mechanism by which a Chinese student at a US university (who pays higher tuition than the average native, especially the average native at risk of being "overlooked") reduces opportunities for Americans?

It's zero-sum thinking. He thinks a Chinese kid going to university is why his cousin Billy Bob went to trade school.

From the perspective of people actually named Billy Bob, going to trade school is not a bad outcome. Americans who blame immigrants for unemployment usually are upset about NEETs, not hypotheticals who could be in Harvard instead of state U, because they do not think that going to state U is anything to be upset about.

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