Some of President Donald Trump’s fiercest supporters howled last month when he casually mentioned plans to bring 600,000 Chinese students to America’s colleges and universities.
The shockingly high number — more than double the current tally — got online influencers raging that Beijing would send us spies and shut Americans out of higher education.
But while Trump might have been wrong about the planned total, he’s right about the policy.
America benefits enormously from attracting the world’s brightest young people — and should make it easier for talented international students to come here and, critically, to stay.
After the firestorm, the White House clarified that Trump’s 600,000 figure was “two years’ worth of visas,” but that isn’t exactly right either.
In reality, about 277,000 Chinese students are now in the United States; only India, with 331,000, sends us more.
But fewer than 90,000 of these Chinese students are undergraduates, and many aren’t enrolled in school at all, but are here on extended student visas that allow them to work in the United States after graduation.
The claim that foreign students take seats away from Americans at our colleges is a myth: Out of the nation’s nearly 16 million undergraduates in the fall of 2023, 342,000 — about 2% — were foreigners.
Most of the 844,000 international students who came to the United States that year enrolled in graduate programs and paid full tuition.
That money, in turn, subsidizes scholarships and financial aid for American undergrads, helping to expand their opportunities.
At public universities, foreign students’ tuition revenue keeps many programs alive that would otherwise be shuttered.
A 2017 study found that foreign students’ tuition dollars even allowed some states to trim their education budgets — and avoid raising tuition for Americans.
Consider, too, demographics: As fewer American high-school seniors graduate each year, the decline will devastate colleges that serve as the economic anchors of their communities.
Foreign students can help keep these colleges afloat, along with local restaurants, landlords, bookstores and other businesses.
But international students’ greatest economic contribution comes from those who stay in America beyond school.
My research, set to be published in a Manhattan Institute paper next month, has found that the average international student who finishes a graduate degree in the US will reduce the national debt by millions of dollars over 30 years.
Some become physicians who save Americans’ lives; others — like Elon Musk, who came here as a student — become successful entrepreneurs.
Attracting international students is also a geopolitical win for the United States, because each talented person who chooses to study in America is one less brain powering a rival regime.
When the smartest young people from China, Iran or Russia come here to learn and stay to build their careers, that’s a loss for authoritarian regimes and a gain for us.
Just as it was against the Soviet Union, brain drain is America’s strongest tool in the competition with China — but it only works if we open our doors to the best international students and give them paths to remain.
For that strategy to succeed, those young brains must also be assimilated, and we must take great care to keep bad actors out.
Trump’s policy of enhanced social-media vetting for student-visa applicants will go a long way to ensure that students admitted to America are assimilable, law-abiding and genuinely desire to learn and contribute — not pro-Hamas or pro-CCP troublemakers who shouldn’t live in a free country.
I’ve seen that danger up close at Columbia University, home to agitator Mahmoud Khalil.
One fellow grad student I’ve met on campus openly admitted on her resume to being a provincial coordinator of the CCP — a shocking breach of the long-standing US immigration ban on members of communist and totalitarian parties.
To ensure this never happens again, the State Department should go beyond social-media vetting and directly quiz students from authoritarian countries about their support for such tyrannical regimes.
Finally, if we’re serious about winning the global competition for talent, America must make it easier for international students to stay and thrive here.
That means exempting foreigners with advanced STEM degrees from green-card caps, and streamlining work visas for graduates.
I know this personally: I came to the United States from Venezuela as an international student, driven by the desire for freedom and my opposition to socialism.
I stayed because America welcomed me, and I’ve devoted my life and my work to helping preserve freedom for the next generation.
There is no free lunch in economics, but the US has something very close to one in the thousands of patriotic and intelligent young people from around the world who want to study, innovate and contribute in America.
Trump is right to welcome them in.
Daniel Di Martino is a Manhattan Institute fellow and a PhD candidate in economics at Columbia University.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
