Behind Trump's Flip-Flop On Chinese Student Visas

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Since the late 1970s, the number of Chinese students attending college in the U.S. has increased dramatically. Photo: Kenishiroite / Getty Images via The Conversation

Yung Wing became the first Chinese student to graduate from a US university in 1852.

Since then, millions of Chinese students have come to the US to study, supported by programs such as the“Chinese Educational Mission ,” Boxer Indemnity Fund scholarships and the Fulbright Program .

The Institute for International Education in New York estimated the economic impact of Chinese students in the US at over US$14 billion a year. Chinese students tend to pay full tuition to their universities.

At the graduate level, they perform vital roles in labs and classrooms. Just under half of all Chinese students attending college in the US are graduate students.

However, there is a long history of equating Chinese migrants as invaders, spies or risks to national security.

After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the US Department of Justice began to prevent Chinese scholars and students in STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and math – from returning to China by stopping them at US ports of entry and exit. They could be pulled aside when trying to board a flight or ship and their tickets canceled.

In one infamous case, Chinese rocket scientist Qian Xuesen was arrested, harassed, ordered deported and prevented from leaving over five years from 1950 to 1955. In 1955, the United States and China began ambassadorial-level talks to negotiate repatriations from either country.

After his experience, Qian became a much-lauded supporter of the Communist government and played an important role in the development of Chinese transcontinental missile technology.

During the 1950s, the US Department of Justice raided Chinatown organizations looking for Chinese migrants who arrived under false names during the Chinese Exclusion Era, a period from the 1880s to 1940s when the US government placed tight restrictions on Chinese immigration into the country. A primary justification for the tactics was fear that the Chinese in the US would spy for their home country.

Between 1949 and 1979, the US and China did not have normal diplomatic relations. The two nations recognized each other and exchanged ambassadors starting in January 1979. In the more than four decades since, the number of Chinese students in the US has increased dramatically .

Anti-Chinese discrimination

The idea of an outright ban on Chinese student visas has raised concerns about increased targeting of Chinese in the US for harassment.

In 1999, Taiwanese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee was arrested on suspicion of using his position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to spy for China. Lee remained imprisoned in solitary confinement for 278 days before he was released without a conviction.

In 2018, during the first Trump administration, the Department of Justice launched its China Initiative . In its effort to weed out industrial, technological and corporate espionage, the initiative targeted many ethnic Chinese researchers and had a chilling effect on continued exchanges, but it secured no convictions for wrongdoing.

Trump again expressed concerns last year that undocumented migrants from China might be coming to the United States to spy or“build an army.”