The United States will “aggressively revoke” the visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday in a press statement.
The announcement marks just the latest move by the Trump administration against U.S. universities. Last week, the White House sought to bar international students from attending Harvard, but a federal judge halted implementation.
Rubio, in the statement, said the visa revocation would also apply to Chinese students in “critical fields,” likely referring to the physical sciences. In recent years, several American officials have said that Beijing recruits U.S.-trained scientists.
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He added that the federal government would work “to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”
A State Department report published last year said that around 275,000 of the 1.1 million international students in American higher education hailed from China, second only to India, which had a record-high 331,602 students in U.S. colleges and universities.
