During the 2023-2024 school year, more than 277,000 Chinese students were enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities. But on Monday, as part of a trade agreement with the Communist regime, Trump opened the door for 600,000 students to come.
This reverses his previous plans to revoke visas for Chinese nationals, and Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, says this is a "truly misguided thought."
"First of all, we should be educating Americans," he contends. "Second of all, we know that a large percentage of Chinese students spy. There're various estimates of what percentage of Chinese students actually commit espionage, but I've seen like 13%, and that sounds right to me."
Fortunately, he says there has been a great deal of pushback on this.
"There are so many people who are upset at this that Trump is probably going to change his mind," Chang predicts. "Everybody's upset about it … because this is a truly horrendous idea. My guess is the president's not going to continue on seeing so much resistance. It would seem to me that he's going to back down."
During his first term, after receiving significant public and voter pushback, President Trump changed his mind on, among other things, the policy that separated families at the U.S.-Mexico border and on banning visitors from several Muslim-majority countries.
More recently, in response to public and political pressure, he has reversed cuts to EV charger funding, restored education funds, and walked back from land swaps with Ukraine.
