US President Donald Trump has invited 600,000 chinese students into American Universities, even as his administration continues its wide-ranging crackdown on international students.
The American leader said Washington and Beijing have a "very important relationship," which is a clear deviation from his previous "America first" policy. Earlier, the Trump administration had promised to "aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those connected to the Chinese Communist Party or any critical fields of study."
"We're going to allow their students to come in. It's very important, 600,000 students. It's very important. But we're going to get along with China," Trump told reporters from the Oval Office.
The President of the United States, said though, had a warning to Beijing to make sure Washington got access to rare earth magnets, or face tariffs of 200 percent. He stated that relations between the two largest economies in the world would not affect Chinese students, who can still come to the US to study.
Tariffs from Trump have caused tensions between the US and China in the last year, to the point that the US imposed tariffs of 145 percent on China before agreeing to a trade truce later. Just ahead of the signing on August 12, Washington and Beijing agreed to extend their trade truce another 90 days from the end of the first one, allowing them additional time to negotiate the agreement, despite Trump having caused considerable global market upheaval earlier in the month with renewed tariffs.
His comments received immediate backlash, including from Trump loyalists who called him out for abandoning the America First Agenda. MAGA stalwart Laura Loomer reportedly made a scathing complaint about the decision, calling Chinese students "CCP spies" in her statements.
Taking to X, she wrote, "I didn't vote for more Muslims and Chinese people to be imported to my country. Sorry but these immigrants from communist countries and Sharia shitholes where child rape is legalised don't make America great. Please don't Make America China. MAGA doesn't want more immigrants."
"When did any China man or Muslim Make America Great?" she asked in another post.
"Now that we are importing 600,000 CCP spies, what's the point of American students going into STEM?" Loomer added.
Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, another Trump supporter, also opposed Team Trump's move and said, "We should not let in 600,000 CHINESE students to attend American colleges and universities that may be loyal to the CCP."
"If refusing to allow these Chinese students to attend our schools causes 15% of them to fail then these schools should fail anyways because they are being propped up by the CCP. Why are we allowing 600,000 students from China to replace our American student's opportunities?" she wrote on X.
When grilled over President Trump's mega Chinese push, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick defended the President's move. Speaking to Fox News, he said, without allowing the Chinese students, "the bottom 15 per cent of universities would go out of business in America. President Trump's taking a rational economic view."
President Trump's new announcement is in clear contrast to his administration's May visa policy, outlining his administration's intentions of putting America first
"Under President Trump's leadership, the US State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong," Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said at the time.
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