Send the Students Home?

In a WSJ Op-Ed writer Mike Gallagher says Send Harvard's Chinese Students Home

Roughly 30% of Harvard's student body is foreign. At Columbia, that share approaches 40%. America's finest universities benefit from billions in government grants and tax breaks while admitting fewer Americans every year. Our elite universities need a change of mindset. They should make a priority of educating exceptional Americans and citizens of our partner nations—not our adversaries.

Mr. Trump noted this summer that "the United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence," which Joe Biden called "a defining technology of our era." Universities help drive that race. Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, has argued that the rate of AI progress may be such that "you need to prevent all of our secrets from going over to our adversaries and you need to lock down the labs."

Blindly embracing academic cooperation with a geopolitical rival is absurd. Nobody suggests we should train Iranian nuclear physicists or Russian ballistics engineers. The U.S. wouldn't have been better off collaborating more with Nazi Germany in the 1930s or with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Why make an exception for a nation dedicated to surpassing the U.S. in emerging technologies?

Universities love Chinese students because they generally pay full freight, often subsidized by the Communist Party state. Universities need that money to feed their ever-expanding bureaucracies, and this dependency corrupts them. 

The Trump administration doesn't need to make deals with universities to rebalance the foreign-student population. Visas are the American president's responsibility, not Harvard's. The government gave universities leeway with immigration policies that mostly rubber-stamped admissions office decisions, but we can change that.