STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We have a critical look at a U.S. move to send home Chinese university students. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the U.S. will, in his words, aggressively revoke visas, including those for students connected to the Communist Party here studying critical fields. Longtime China analyst Robert Daly says this sends a message.
ROBERT DALY: We seem now to be telling the world's largest talent pool that it's a despised class in the United States, despite the contributions that they've made here over the past four decades.
INSKEEP: Daly has studied China for 35 years. He was at the nonpartisan Wilson Center for Scholars, a think tank here in Washington, until the Trump administration closed it. He's been trying to understand which students stay and who must go.
DALY: If you want to come here and study Jane Austen, which is very important - I hope that they do - maybe you can still come. But for the others in, we assume, science fields, STEM fields, including in basic research - because so many of the breakthroughs we're looking for in nano or quantum or advanced computing deal with material science, deal with basic research. And if that is seen as inadmissible, that would mean that most of the sciences get cut off.
INSKEEP: I want to work through a variety of facts and arguments here. First, is it documented that Chinese students who've come here and stayed have contributed to the U.S. economy in a significant way?
DALY: We don't have metrics on those who've stayed and all that they've achieved so that most of what we know about them, we know anecdotally by their representation in private and national laboratories, by the companies that they have founded, by the patents that they have earned.
INSKEEP: And there are many of those.
DALY: There are many, many of those.
INSKEEP: Is there a demand for extra engineers in the United States?
DALY: The Chinese students who are being admitted into the graduate programs in STEM fields, by and large, are not taking the place of - are not outcompeting native-born Americans who also want Ph.D.s in physics. We are not producing enough people who want those, so they're not being squeezed out.
INSKEEP: Somebody listening might be saying, are we not producing enough of them because foreign students are taking all the slots in universities? Harvard was a quarter foreign students.
DALY: They were a quarter foreign students, but this is...
INSKEEP: At Harvard. Yeah.
DALY: At Harvard, yes, and other universities, too. The numbers have gone up. After the financial crisis, many American universities, especially but not only public universities, let in large numbers of Chinese students because they paid full out-of-state tuition. Some universities unquestionably went too far with this and got addicted. But there's a big difference between the undergraduate Chinese, who are studying all sorts of things, largely accounting...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
DALY: ...Finance, and the graduate students who have been an important part of American innovation for so long and who tend to stay. The undergraduates tend to go back.
INSKEEP: Vice President Vance has made a particular argument, saying we don't really need foreign talent. We have American talent. Look at the moon shot, he has said. And his critics have pointed out, well, there were Germans who came over and helped with the moon shot. But anyway, Americans did a lot of the work. What do you make of that argument that we could have enough natural-grown talent?
DALY: Well, the moon shot was a while back. It was a very different America. Could we have enough homegrown talent? Yes, we could. I would believe that argument if cutting off American universities to foreign students was coupled with a major push and major funding for education in public schools across the country. You know, Kennedy put money behind the moon shot - right? - that was specifically designed to encourage and foster first-rate talent across America, urban and rural. But it's not. That isn't happening.
INSKEEP: Are there cases in which Chinese students have been a direct security risk to the United States, by which I mean they were somehow spies? They were stealing something.
DALY: So you may remember that in the first Trump administration, we had something called the China Initiative - was run by the FBI to suss this out. The idea was that American universities, because of their openness, because of their internationalization - the idea is that there's a vulnerability here. And that's a coherent idea. I think that's true.
INSKEEP: OK.
DALY: The total number of convictions for espionage on American campuses during that time was zero - none. So that legitimate concern about security, unsubstantiated to date by evidence, is not being weighed against all of the benefits that we have from all of the Chinese talent that has stayed in this country.
INSKEEP: Let's talk about the Chinese who study here and then go home. And when I travel to China, I meet lots of them. Are former Chinese students using their U.S. educations to, in some way, defeat, disadvantage or compete against the United States, China's great rival?
DALY: This is where it gets really tricky. And so the real question is, how great a threat is China really? We are contributing to what China calls its comprehensive national power. Throughout the '70s, '80s, '90s, the first decade of this century, we took it as given that all these Chinese students coming here was a soft power win for us, that they would be more impressed than otherwise, and that even if they went back to China, their values, the kind of institutions they set up, the things they would advocate for would be more liberal than if they hadn't left China in the first place. Now that China is wealthy and powerful and a pure competitor, that has flipped. And what had been seen as a major soft power win is now seen as a vulnerability.
There's a great deal of fear here. Why have we lost confidence that bright, young, attentive people who spent four or eight or 10 years here wouldn't be impressed by the United States in a way that would work to our benefit on average, even if they returned to China? That confidence is gone.
INSKEEP: Should we still have confidence that students who go home from the United States back to China are spreading American influence and ideas?
DALY: I wouldn't necessarily claim that they're spreading American influence and ideas. In my experience, what studying in America does do for the Chinese - doesn't mean they're not patriotic. It doesn't mean they won't work for the increased wealth and power of their country.
INSKEEP: Sure.
DALY: But it does, to some degree, inoculate them against the worst kind of Chinese Communist Party propaganda about the United States.
INSKEEP: One of China's reactions to this announcement by Secretary of State Rubio, as I understand it, is essentially, good. Yay. Chinese students, come home. Do you think that is a sincere reaction, and is this somehow a win for China?
DALY: It's semi-sincere. China still needs to have their students go to the United States and go to the West. But they've also done a marvelous job of building more universities, attracting international talent. They are now using the attack on science, the defunding of science, the attack on universities in America - they're using it as Europe is using it to try to invite top researchers to come back to China.
INSKEEP: Mr. Daly, it's a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
DALY: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's longtime China scholar Robert Daly. We asked the State Department to clarify which critical fields would warrant revoking a visa. They did not answer specifically, but said every visa adjudication is a national security decision. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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