By LENA WANG
On May 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department would “work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or studying in critical fields.” This threat follows the Trump administration’s thwarted attempt to terminate several thousand international students’ statuses in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a measure taken with the aim of clamping down on pro-Palestinian protesters.
Rubio’s declaration reveals a blatant intention to continue conditioning the immigration status of U.S. international students based on their political views and nationalities. In particular, it marks a continuation of the U.S.’s recent hostility toward Chinese nationals in academia and its centuries of discrimination against Chinese immigrants.
In fact, the Chinese diaspora was the first to be targeted by federal restrictions on immigration to the U.S. through the Page Act of 1875. This was followed by the more comprehensive Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which forbade most Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. until its repeal with the 1943 Magnuson Act, which passed largely because China had become a U.S. ally during WWII. Amidst Cold War tensions in the 1950s, The U.S. once again limited Chinese and Asian immigration through the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which assigned quotas for most immigrants based on their national origin, while race-based quotas were allotted for Asians.
Today, as tensions rise between the U.S. and the PRC, the U.S. government is again targeting Chinese immigrants with racist, xenophobic measures. The 300,000 Chinese international students in the U.S., an essential sector of American higher education, have been a key area of contention for the U.S.-China rivalry since Trump’s first term.
In November 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice rolled out the China Initiative, a program that claimed to investigate and prosecute researchers at U.S. universities suspected of intellectual property theft on behalf of the CCP. According to the MIT Technology Review in 2021, the China Initiative failed on its own terms, with thousands of investigations leading to only 148 charges, less than a third of which led to a conviction. By launching unfounded accusations of espionage at academics purely based on their ethnicity, the China Initiative destroyed the lives and careers of many Chinese academics—causing over a hundred researchers to lose their jobs, and driving at least one scientist to suicide.
As of June 11, Trump has reneged on the threat against Chinese international students’ enrollment, announcing that they would be allowed to continue their studies if China would supply magnets and rare earth minerals to U.S. companies in return. Of course, this does not mean Chinese international students are safe; rather, they have become a major bargaining chip in the U.S.-China trade war. While inter-imperialist tensions escalate, the rights of Chinese students hang in the balance.
As the U.S. government launches a full assault on immigrant rights, it is imperative that we organize affected members of the Chinese diaspora while building a broad, diverse coalition in defense of all immigrants and foreign-born residents—connecting the struggles of the Chinese, Latino, and Palestinian communities and beyond. A successful counter to the escalating attacks on immigrants’ rights will require building solidarity across the working class, in our unions and neighborhoods, to fight xenophobic illusions, and to demand protections for Chinese internationals and all non-citizens.
