Republicans in the US House of Representatives plan to introduce a bill on Friday to block Chinese citizens from getting student visas, citing their potential to serve as spies for Beijing, and adding fresh fuel to a debate about attracting needed foreign talent while addressing national security concerns.
Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia, a first-term congressman, is the sponsor of the “Stop Chinese Communist Prying by Vindicating Intellectual Safeguards in Academia Act”, which would halt issuance of student or research visas for all Chinese nationals.
The bill, which goes further than most previous attempts to restrict Chinese students, would have to pass the full House and Senate before it could be signed into law.
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As yet, it has no confirmed cosponsors. According to Fox News, expected supporters include Republican Representatives Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Brandon Gill of Texas and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.
Moore’s legislation comes as US President Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly weighing a new travel ban for citizens from a select group of countries, though there is no indication yet that China is on that list.
International students have come under fire in the early weeks of the new Trump administration.
On Thursday, demonstrators entered Trump Tower in Manhattan to protest the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the US whom the Trump administration wants to deport over his pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University.
Chinese citizens make up the second largest group of foreign students in the US, after Indian nationals. In the 2023-24 academic year, 277,398 Chinese students were in the US, a figure that has steadily declined since the 2019-20 school year.
“While many of these visa holders came here to study, far too many also served as intelligence gatherers or paid spies for the CCP,” Moore wrote in a column in Newsweek last month.
To bolster his claim, Moore cited the case of five Chinese students at the University of Michigan who were charged in October with misleading authorities about their activities near a remote military site.
“We cannot eliminate this threat by simply devoting more time and money to the visa vetting process,” he continued, saying that the US could not accurately flag the espionage risk of Chinese nationals because “many who enter the United States with pure intentions are later recruited or coerced by the CCP”.
Both Democrats and Republicans have sounded alarm in recent years about the role that non-traditional agents like students and researchers can play in gathering intelligence about sensitive information or technologies. But Republicans have been the primary advocates for blanket bans on Chinese students.
In Project 2025, the blueprint by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank for a second Trump administration, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is asked to work with the State Department to “eliminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations”.
In 2020, during his first term, Trump signed a proclamation that led to the cancellation of over 1,000 visas for Chinese nationals deemed “high-risk graduate students and research scholars”.
Moore’s bill does not differentiate between a student’s field or level of study. It targets the three main types of US study visas – F, J and M visas – which are used, respectively, for studying at US universities and English language institutes; exchanges at the high school and university level; and non-academic and vocational training or study.
Other recent legislation, such as bills introduced by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, have targeted graduate-level students or researchers from China and those focused on science, computer science, engineering, maths and other “STEM” fields.
Opponents of broad bans argue that the benefits of academic input and exchange brought by Chinese students outweigh the risk of espionage.
“Basic educational exchange is a foundation for US-China relations,” said Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the senior Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, in response to Moore’s bill.
“These visa restrictions are overly broad and damaging to the many Chinese students who hope to study at the best universities in the world,” he said, adding that research security “must be achieved with a scalpel, not a bludgeon”.
Representative Grace Meng, a New York Democrat who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said on Thursday that banning only Chinese students was “xenophobic and wrong-headed”.
“We cannot give in to fearmongering tactics that will restrict the freedoms and economic opportunities that make America the envy of the world,” she added.
Previous bills to block Chinese students have failed to become law and drawn strong criticism from Asian-American groups.
“It is unconscionable to suggest limiting the fields of study or remove visa options for all students from China,” said John Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, in 2020, after a proposal by Cotton to restrict visas for Chinese students.
Reacting to Moore’s bill, Yang said on Thursday: “We strongly reject this move to paint all Chinese students as a threat and caution against racial profiling based on geography and not fact.”
Yet concerns about the security risk posed by Chinese students, particularly in STEM, had been voiced at the highest levels of government even during the Joe Biden administration.
In June, Kurt Campbell, then the deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration, said he would like to see more Chinese students coming “to study the humanities and social sciences, not particle physics”.
In terms of STEM subjects, Campbell said he wanted to see “much larger numbers of Indian students”.
Meanwhile, some students from China who had obtained visas complained about facing intensified scrutiny and deportation upon entering the US. China’s embassy and consulates in the US launched several formal protests over the matter last year.
More from South China Morning Post:
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