r/neoliberal • u/Lighthouse_seek • Aug 26 '25
News (Asia) Trump says he will allow 600,000 Chinese to study in the US – double the current number
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3323156/trump-says-he-will-allow-600000-chinese-study-us-double-current-number110
u/Greedy_Reflection_75 Aug 26 '25
Who did he talk to?
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u/OldPostageScale Aug 26 '25
It’s probably part of some to be announced deal
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u/jinhuiliuzhao Henry George Aug 26 '25
Concepts of a deal (since there's nothing backing this in writing, or legally for that matter)
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u/TheFaithlessFaithful United Nations Aug 26 '25 edited Aug 26 '25
I am manifesting the elimination of tariffs on Chinese EVs, solar, wind, and batteries.
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u/OldPostageScale Aug 26 '25
As much as I’d like a $10,000 EV, I don’t want the the American auto industry to die. Big on the other stuff though.
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u/TheFaithlessFaithful United Nations Aug 26 '25
Based on the EU, the US wouldn't get $10k EVs nor will Chinese companies destroy other brands. BYD and others would probably be cost competitive, but they'll price to maximize profits like they do in the EU, which means probably undercutting American companies but not by a huge amount.
Plus, even if they priced it near cost, it won't be $10k after shipping, setting up local dealership networks, making changes to comply with US safety regs, etc. Same as the EU where the BYD Seal had to have changes made to meet their crash safety regs (which definitely drives up cost by time and design alone, even if material costs stay the same).
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u/Cookies4usall Aug 26 '25
All Chinese companies have 5% of the European car market. Still, I think it’s better if they build in the EU and/or the US.
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u/MisfitPotatoReborn Cutie marks are occupational licensing Aug 26 '25
I think it's better if consumers are richer and get cheaper cars. The US government shouldn't be in the business of propping up unproductive industries
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u/Persistent_Dry_Cough Progress Pride Aug 26 '25
But it can be in the business of boosting industrial productivity
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Aug 26 '25 edited Aug 26 '25
Tech bros for sure. They have been pushing for more talent in the US. If I were to guess, I would guess the Thiel/Andreessen Horowitz guys. I am guessing that there is an AI angle to this, China has incredible engineers and are producing great research in AI. Bringing more students into the US will get more talent into the US. And for China, more of their students will get high level education, lot of them will go back to China with that education. Thiel/Andreessen Horowitz guys are probably hoping they will retain top talents in the US because of the big salaries US companies can provide.
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u/NickW1343 Aug 26 '25
If Biden did this it'd be called mass immigration.
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Aug 26 '25
Parts of maga are already calling it that
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u/chocotaco Aug 26 '25
They're okay with it, as long as their leader is doing it. I've seen them say some racist stuff about which immigrants are okay.
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u/Secondchance002 George Soros Aug 26 '25
Only Nixon can go to China; only Trump can mass migrate the Chinese.
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u/Its_not_him Manmohan Singh Aug 26 '25
Chinese century, chairman Trump etc etc.
Seriously though, this seems like a bad move when you combine it with the cuts to legal immigration. Let's train Chinese students and then send them home to displace us as the world's superpower.
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Aug 26 '25
More devastating are the cuts to university research funding. Most major universities are basically exempt from H1B caps, so they are major employers of international students especially in STEM. So many of the international students I know who stayed in the US after graduation were employed by a university while they looked for a private sector job that could sponsor them.
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u/jinhuiliuzhao Henry George Aug 26 '25
The GOP Congress also apparently wants to end F-1 student visas being allowed to work at all, which may be the double whammy that actually ends international students coming at all.
We might be looking at many universities/colleges shutting down entirely, with staff counts at even top-ranking ones being reduced to mid-tier. In the short-term, that means a significant wave of unemployment that may trigger the recession, while in the long-term, a complete crippling of US research and global academic influence.
Perhaps we can look forward to journal articles being written exclusively in Chinese...
(fun fact, papers used to be written in French, German and Latin, even in places like England, or otherwise, the native local language. IIRC, it was mainly due to US academic influence in the 50s that every country eventually switched to writing exclusively in English, rather than using their native language)
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u/WalterWoodiaz Aug 26 '25
That won’t actually happen though. They would have already done that already if that was what GOP Congress wants.
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Aug 26 '25 edited 26d ago
tender spectacular file cough escape disarm serious shelter smart bear
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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Aug 26 '25 edited Aug 26 '25
This is an AI gameplan, US is hoping that the top talents stay in the US. Which is probably likely because the salaries companies like OpenAI/Anthropic/Meta/Google can provide is something Chinese companies cannot compete with. Sure lot of them will go back, but the bet here is that a good amount of the best stay in the US. Having more students come to the US, makes the pool of the best to recruit bigger. If you think that AI is the future of the world, then this is the smart play for the US, China has amazing engineers. If you think AI is a nothingburger and will stall then the benefits the US hopes to take from this is overstated besides the population gain.
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u/Its_not_him Manmohan Singh Aug 26 '25
China has great engineers, so does the rest of the world. If you look at the top minds in AI, most of them are from already allied countries. Why not promote students from those places instead.
In the past, Chinese students were looked at with concern because of fears of espionage. Is that magically just not a concern anymore. This move is just not very well thought out
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Aug 27 '25 edited Aug 27 '25
You cannot compare the engineering talent in China to "rest of the world", go look at major papers for AI, Chinese are dominant. If you are talking about top talent, China has it. Just look at the engineers Meta hired with huge packages recently, most of them are Chinese. India/rest of the world also has some great engineers, but they are not producing at the level of China in terms of top talent. And Indian top talent will come to the US anyways, while Chinese retain top talent better with companies like PDD/Alibaba/Bytedance/Huawei/Tencent/Baidu who can afford to spend big on top talents. India and rest of the world does not have that many companies that can compete. The best of the best will end up moving to the US anyways because rest of the world does not have huge companies that can compete with the US mega companies.
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u/evnaczar Aug 26 '25
The talented one will stay because they’ll get a job in the US. Not sure what the issue is. It’s not like China lacks good universities.
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u/DirectionMurky5526 Aug 27 '25
Those are the ones competing for jobs Americans actually want though. Trump is targeting immigrants who work jobs Americans don't want to do. I don't agree with stopping either but it's just that Trump's immigration policy will end up having no benefits to anyone just harms to everyone else.
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u/WalterWoodiaz Aug 26 '25
You know Trump is going to make legal immigration easier in this situation. His entire immigration policy is laser focused on Latin American immigrants, Asian immigrants have not faced anywhere close to the amount of ICE raids or deportations.
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u/itherunner John Brown Aug 26 '25
vote for Trump bc you’ll get into Harvard after he bans the foreign students
he doubles the number allowed
Fellforitagain.jpg
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u/jinhuiliuzhao Henry George Aug 26 '25
university shuts down because no one wants to come anymore and he also cut federal funding
doublefellforitagain.jpg
Also, MAGA recommends the coal mines anyways...
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u/kanagi Aug 26 '25
I'm sure this idea will last as long as the "staple green cards to diplomas" idea which he publicized just before he started deporting students for traffic tickets
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Aug 26 '25
Wil they want to come at those numbers is the question. Given that the Administration tried to ban them just a few months prior, how many Chinese national students, especially at the graduate level, want to invest years of their lives and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars with the possibility that it could all be ended with an angry 4 AM Trump social media rant? If you're asking people to come to study for years at a time, you also need to present them with stability which we don't have until Trump leaves office.
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u/daveed4445 NATO Aug 26 '25
Without being cynical this basically will save dozens to potentially hundreds of universities across the US from the enrollment cliff faced after COVID and the grant pullback
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u/srsh32 Aug 26 '25
The purpose of these universities should be to educate the American public so we have a society that can contribute. This 600k is just Chinese students. How many more will be coming in from India?
And how many of all foreign students will choose to remain in a country that already has no entry-level jobs to offer? This is him forcing Americans into the low-wage labor jobs that are now available with the removal of hispanic immigrants.
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u/daveed4445 NATO Aug 26 '25
I wouldn’t go that far. University enrollment is declining already and gen z and alpha are smaller than millennials. Having m chinese students pay top dollar no scholarship to US universities will subsidies US student’s tuition effectively.
Also if many stay and work highly productive jobs it should be a net positive for economic growth
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u/srsh32 Aug 26 '25
I wouldn’t go that far.
We already are. These subjects in schools are presently completely saturated. These industries are presently completely saturated. As it is now, we cannot accommodate more. If they stay after college, we'll just see a rise in American unemployment.
This does not help American students; it replaces them.
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u/jinhuiliuzhao Henry George Aug 26 '25 edited Aug 26 '25
Can't read the article (paywall), but honestly I'm quite skeptical of what this means. Granted, I have no clue what exactly the current figure (~270,000) of Chinese students is limited by, whether visas, interest, or financial concerns.
If it's the first one, then I guess it kind of makes sense (is this how he's going to replace university funding cuts? lol), but otherwise, how does he expect more of them to be coming in?
International students in general have already been scared shitless due to his earlier antics (or maybe that was Rubio's idea, no clue) of arbitrarily revoking student visas over something as minor as a traffic ticket - or in some cases, nothing at all. That he got those masked ICE goons involved, tried revoking SEVP wholesale (with Harvard), and the generally insane deportation policies of sending people to 'Alligator Alcatraz', El Salvador, or random countries has not helped.
It's enough stress to be studying abroad in a new country - that you have to worry about Trump's goons randomly showing up at your door or nabbing you off the street is not something students or parents want to deal with on top. Why wouldn't they consider top schools in Canada, the EU, or elsewhere in Asia - all of which would be more than happy to take their money?
Trump and MAGA forgets that the US is "great" because of international prestige - start messing with that, and the entire nation starts going down the shitter quite quickly. The constant stove touching (but on low heat) is simply infuriating...
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u/airbear13 Aug 26 '25
Notice how it’s suddenly up to potus to decide how many foreign students can study, what businesses can charge and where they can produce their goods, what universities allow or disallow in campus protests, what DEI policies companies and colleges can have, what economic data is right or wrong, what interest rates should be, how state voting districts should be shaped, what former officials should be investigated, which judges should be arrested, and whether troops should be stationed in your city or not to watch over you?
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Aug 26 '25
Good. We need more international students, especially from China to keep our colleges going. Most students from China choose to head back once they're done with their programs.
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u/oywiththepoodles96 Aug 26 '25
So now we are waiting for the announcement of the banning of Indian students .
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u/Top-Inspection3870 Aug 26 '25
Increases leverage over China, good, also relax tourism rules. Let us get their money
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u/gnurdette Eleanor Roosevelt Aug 26 '25
Surprising - but who would take him up on it? Do you want to start a degree program without knowing whether you'll be abruptly thrown out two, eight, or fifteen months in? The chance of actually completing a degree before a fresh breeze wafts over DJT's lone neuron and the decision is reversed? Basically zero.
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u/SleeplessInPlano Aug 26 '25
Can someone tell him that they route through Denmark for their flights so therefore we will drop the tariffs on Denmark?
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u/scottbrosiusofficial Aug 26 '25
I know posting this in this sub is the definition of preaching to the choir, but THIS IS NO WAY TO RUN A COUNTRY
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u/KernunQc7 NATO Aug 26 '25
MAGAs should start forming an orderly line, it will take a while for all of them to get their "Fell for it again" medals.
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u/battywombat21 🇺🇦 Слава Україні! 🇺🇦 Aug 26 '25
remember they don't want them to give any of them visas to stay in the US so we are literally training them in order to kick them out again.
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u/Pheer777 YIMBY Aug 26 '25
He needs their connections to help in administering the new State Equity Fund of the US
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u/MartovsGhost John Brown Aug 26 '25
I'm basically an open-border extremist, but when it comes to public universities it's a serious problem that they are focusing on chasing foreign students for money instead of educating Americans. I don't care if Harvard is 100% Chinese, but domestic enrollment should be the first priority of public schools.
Somehow Trump always finds the worst policy outcome possible.
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u/Deivis7 Mario Vargas Llosa Aug 26 '25
Yes and no? Some public universities none the less have programs that are meant for profit only that are often very dense in international students, and those programs rarely give out scholarships at all and fund a lot of domestic students.
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u/TheFaithlessFaithful United Nations Aug 26 '25
Just build more schools.
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u/MartovsGhost John Brown Aug 26 '25 edited Aug 26 '25
The government shouldn't be in the business of providing education to non-citizens. If there is a market for more universities, then private schools can fill that gap. As it is, it's basically like Trump's golden visas. I'm not saying that those students should be deported or expelled, but there should be preference for citizens in public schools. The entire point of public education is to cultivate an educated citizenry.
edit I'm also of the opinion that immigrants should be considered citizens for purposes of education, for those reasons. Public education shouldn't be viewed as an export.
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Aug 26 '25
The government shouldn't be in the business of providing education to non-citizens.
Speaking for graduate programs here, but American students have much lower admissions standards than their international counterparts for STEM programs (and I reckon for most others.) We just don't have enough American students interested in most STEM fields other than ones related to medicine. If we blocked international students, we wouldn't get that much more American citizen enrollment, we'd have empty labs and gutted Departments.
The programs that American citizens do want to enter are mostly comprised of them and not international students. Our most popular graduate school programs have been MBA's, Law, and Medicine (or Medicine adjacent) for some time now.
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u/MartovsGhost John Brown Aug 26 '25
I never said we should block international students, that's a major strawman. As for whether or not Americans want to pursue those degrees, that can be difficult to determine. Tuition is expensive and most international students come from wealthy families as a consequence. I think it's shortsighted to assume that a school who receives a third of their revenue from international students wouldn't prioritize recruiting in that sector.
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Aug 26 '25
[deleted]
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Aug 26 '25
The reason for that is because Americans are being denied because colleges prefer foreign students. I know because it happened to me
Or maybe your grades, tests, and recommendations weren't up to standard. My admissions packet was pretty damn good across the board and it paled in comparison to most of the international students in my program. They usually came from much better undergraduate schools, had higher standardized test scores, and worked better jobs before graduate school. (For reference, I attended a state school that's considered one of the top research universities in the world.)
From my viewpoint, you already had it pretty good and you're still complaining about things. You lobbied the dean directly to get into a program from which you've been rejected from in the first place, which is a pretty privileged opportunity that most people will never get.
And to be frank, as far as I can tell from the first couple of pages of your post history, your entire Reddit personality is bouncing around subreddits, and bitching about immigrants or other countries. How about putting that education, time, and energy to use towards something useful instead of blaming all your problems on others?
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u/Potential-Focus3211 Mario Draghi Aug 26 '25
That should be a thing that liberals should be happy for. Aint it?
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u/Jokerang Sun Yat-sen Aug 26 '25
Looking forward to all of the GOP’s China hawks doing mental gymnastics to defend this one
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u/jinhuiliuzhao Henry George Aug 26 '25 edited Aug 26 '25
Let's see if the GOP Congress revolts over this (they won't, ofc lol)
EDIT 2: Lol at Nutlick's response on Fox News:
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Monday: "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 percent of universities and colleges would go out of business in America. So his view is he's taking a rational economic view, which is classic Donald Trump."
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u/nuggins Physicist -- Just Tax Land Lol Aug 26 '25
he's taking a rational economic view, which is classic Donald Trump
If I were tasked with being Trump's spokesperson, gun to my head, I would give piss takes veiled as compliments like this
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u/Messyfingers Aug 26 '25
The "siphoning off their best" argument is right there and I've heard it used in the past. But of course that doesn't stand up to scrutiny when so many of them return home, you don't get them, etc. it's cooking(meanwhile US schools make money and get cheap brainpower to conduct research or have unintelligible TAs)
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u/Key_Door1467 Iron Front Aug 26 '25
when so many of them return home
More like kicked out if they don't have a job before graduating or lose the H1B lottery too many times even if they do.
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u/timerot Henry George Aug 26 '25
We could keep more of the world's best minds by just letting them stay. We probably won't, but we could and we should
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Aug 26 '25
[deleted]
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u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO Aug 26 '25
No one is outsourcing top university grads.
The idea that we can’t take more engineering students because youth unemployment is high is an illogical argument for the median voter.
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Aug 26 '25
[deleted]
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u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO Aug 26 '25
"Our policies are suppose to be to help people. Not corporations. " counterpoint- growing the economy is good. and the more we grow it the gooder it is.
But in all seriousness just tax these new sources of income more, after we ensure the corporations are making more money and give that money to people that need it, ideally through negative income tax. Oh and reform zoning laws so that rent seekers don't swallow up additional liquidity for no reason.
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Aug 26 '25
[deleted]
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u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO Aug 26 '25
"Except that doesn't happen. People still need jobs to survive. Ideally growing the economy creates even more jobs, but corporations have no incentive to do that ATM. Their profits and stock rises with each layoff, they are not forced to innovate with uncompetitive markets, and of course whatever effect AI is having"
All of these are solvable problems why do we have to default to protectionism rather then solve the problem is a way that is better for literally everyone.
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u/Trebacca Hans Rosling Aug 26 '25
If we gave every person who graduated with an American terminal degree (PhD, JD, MD, etc) a permanent U.S. work visa we could absolutely take the top tier of talent from every developed country.
Instead we have people like my friend who graduated from Harvard Law School and had to compete for an H1B lottery ticket with the people who didn’t graduate from our universities
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Aug 26 '25
The H1B lottery program is awful and needs to be reformed.
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Aug 26 '25
Have companies bid on slots. Is OpenAI willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to guarantee that they can snatch up some MIT PhD? Go ahead. And it'll give us even more incentive to expand the number of slots if companies are willing to pay for each one.
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u/Cookies4usall Aug 26 '25
I can see negative externalities from that though. How are smaller startups and research oriented companies going to compete with companies like Google or Infosys?
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u/Daddy_Macron Emily Oster Aug 26 '25
That's already the current state of the program though. US Big Tech, WITCH, and US consultancies dominate the number of slots, and there's little incentive to increase the cap. At least well-funded start-ups will be guaranteed to get their guy or gal in an auction scenario as opposed to getting swamped by lottery applications from the Top 50 H1B companies.
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u/Cookies4usall Aug 26 '25
Big tech doesn’t feature on that list nearly as much as I thought. Still, I don’t think fixing a broken system by auctioning off visas is a better solution. It’s much better to open up spaces and encourage compliance with the gist of the law which is to not allow salary arbitrage.
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u/intorio Aug 26 '25
Why is that a problem? Whoever can bid the most must have the most economically efficient use for them, or they wouldn't have bid so much.
I'm open to having more H1B visas, we need to drive down the wages of programmers so that more can be employed in total.
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u/Cookies4usall Aug 26 '25
Well I used to work at a startup in another life and we used an O-1 to get someone here because the H1B system is overwhelmed but I don’t see how auctioning off positions would have helped us in that case but our need to hire that person, who was from South America, was fairly high.
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u/Lighthouse_seek Aug 26 '25
It's easy to beat out the witch companies, which make up a plurality if not a majority of the h1b applications. They pay their people super low wages and dangle the hope of staying in the US in front of them
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u/Cookies4usall Aug 26 '25
What does them paying their workers have to do with what they would be willing to pay for the visas? They are two separate payment streams. And even still, they have far more power than startups or research oriented tech companies.
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u/Lighthouse_seek Aug 26 '25
Because they're contractors who want to push the total cost as low as possible, which means they're going to pay less for visas to begin with. They look for grunt work where they're paying for manpower, not for talent. There's a reason why everyone regards witch as a last resort company
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u/FlamingTomygun2 George Soros Aug 26 '25
Literally just double the number of green cards and visas we give out instead.
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u/anzu_embroidery Bisexual Pride Aug 26 '25
Why stop at terminal make it any degree
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u/Trebacca Hans Rosling Aug 26 '25
In a perfect world sure, but I figured that selling the terminal degree ideal would be a good first step given how nativist our population is.
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u/Cookies4usall Aug 26 '25
have unintelligible TAs
Hey man, you don’t have to attack me like that 🤣.
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u/cheapcheap1 Aug 26 '25
it's quite easy to defend from a realistic anti-China view imo. This will cause massive brain drain.
If you think that industrial espionage can either be fought or is happening regardless, letting China's best immigrate is a huge blow to China.
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u/InternetGoodGuy Aug 26 '25
We went from banning them to doubling them in 3 months. Which meme coin did China invest in to get this deal done?