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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   25489 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.

The best policy is probably to a) maximally leverage domestic talent, b) allow foreign STEM students, but require that they be selected purely on the basis of academic merit and set up incentives such that almost all of them stay after graduating, and c) issue work visas on the basis of actual talent (offered salary is a close enough proxy).

That's not what we've been doing, of course. We have, instead, been deliberately sandbagging domestic talent, allowing universities to admit academically unimpressive foreigners as a source of cash, letting or sometimes forcing actually impressive foreign students to return home after graduation, and dealing out H-1B visas through a lottery for which an entry-level IT guy can qualify.

Against that backdrop, there's probably quite a lot of room to kick out foreign students and still produce a net improvement by eliminating affirmative action and tweaking the rules on H-1B and O-1 visas.

I think "the system is very far from the Pareto frontier" is not really justification for a specific course of action.

Yes, there is room to produce a net improvement, that doesn't mean this particular strategy is likely to be so, especially given the quality of execution we've seen so far.

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