On Chinese student visa rollback, MAGA scores another victory over tech

Politico

3 days ago

The Trump administration's move Wednesday night to revoke Chinese students' visas created another political headache for a powerful industry already struggling to deal with the White House's barrage of changes to trade and visa policies.
Although the announcement was light on details, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Wednesday that the U.S. will 'aggressively revoke' visas for Chinese students, singling out students 'studying in critical fields.'
Computer science, math and engineering top the list of subjects that Chinese students study in the U.S. — areas that could well be in the crosshairs of national security concerns. They're also of central importance to the tech industry, which relies enormously on foreign-born talent.
'This is not just going after one of 10 different pathways into the U.S.,' Jeremy Neufeld, director of immigration policy at the Institute for Progress, told DFD. 'It's going after the primary way that we are recruiting talent, and it is going to significantly reduce the amount of talent that we are able to recruit.'
A remarkable 70 percent of Silicon Valley's highly educated tech employees are from overseas, according to a recent study from a regional think tank — and of that group, China supplies more than any country except India. Eighteen percent of those employees are currently Chinese-born.
It's not clear how many of them literally came as college or graduate students, but at a moment when the U.S. is locked in a tech race with China, kicking out Chinese students strikes many industry observers as an ill-timed own goal.
'This is, frankly, going to play into the Chinese's hands,' Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told POLITICO. 'They're going to ramp up the research and teaching quality of their universities even more, so that in 10 years even if we were begging them to send their students, they're going to say, 'Nah, we're not going to do that.' '
But the tech industry is — so far — largely keeping quiet about the policy. Of the numerous Big Tech companies and affiliated groups contacted by POLITICO in the wake of Rubio's announcement, almost none were willing to go on the record Thursday. Meta, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia formally declined to comment. Tesla, Amazon and Apple didn't respond to POLITICO's emails.
Their silence speaks to the political squeeze that the industry finds itself in after largely accommodating itself to Trump — and even, for many leaders, pledging their explicit support for the president.
The argument over foreign tech workers began to stir up drama between the MAGA and techie wings of the GOP before Trump even took office for the second time. In the months between the election and Jan. 20, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon — both Trump supporters — found themselves embroiled in a high-profile public debate over H1-B visas, which allow companies to bring high-skilled workers to the United States. Musk, a champion of the visas, argued that although flawed, the program was necessary to compete with China and other high-tech nations; Bannon argued in nationalist terms that the program should be abolished entirely in favor of nurturing homegrown talent.
The visa move looks like another win for the Bannon wing.
DFD reached out to influential voices in the right-leaning parts of the tech world — thinkers and investors who had supported Trump as a vehicle for accelerating American competitiveness. Like the Big Tech firms, they wanted no part of this conversation.
Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm whose employees pepper the Trump administration and whose 'American Dynamism' portfolio emphasizes a high-tech, pro-industrial vision of state capacity, simply pointed POLITICO to a blog post about 'talent' that made no mention of student visas or foreign workers. Julius Krein, the conservative policy wonk who argues for a strong government hand in building competitive national industries, declined to comment, telling DFD it's 'not really an issue I have any meaningful insight on.' The Foundation for American Innovation declined to comment beyond pointing DFD to an essay by senior fellow Dan Lips promoting broad reforms to the student visa program.
One industry figure who did weigh in: Josh Wolfe, partner and co-founder at venture capital firm Lux Capital, who called the visa policy shortsighted — and, like Atkinson, saw it as something of a gift to China.
'If we make it harder for the world's best minds to stay and build here, we're not just stifling startups, we're underwriting our competitors,' he said. 'Talent is national security. We should act like it.'
The Bannonite contingent within the Republican Party has the advantage of a very simple message: Jobs in America should go to Americans, tech or otherwise. But the economic and geopolitical reality the country's biggest industries have to navigate isn't quite that simple. Americans, at least for now, are not qualified to do many of the jobs required to meet the administration's goal of besting China on the world stage.
'China graduates over 50 percent of the world's AI undergrads,' said Wolfe, whose firm invests in AI companies, 'and America's share of international students has dropped from 23 percent to 15 percent over two decades. That's less a statistic and more like strategic surrender.'
China has four times the population of the United States, and a massive advantage when it comes to STEM education. According to a report from research firm fDi Intelligence, China graduated more STEM PhDs than the United States starting in 2007, and doubled the American number by 2022. Chinese industry is making huge strides in AI and microchip development, not to mention other fields like advanced biotech.
With that background, it's not just policy wonks who are concerned about the Trump administration's hard-line nationalist policies putting America on its back foot. Though he didn't weigh in Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — whose company produces the advanced microchips at the center of an ongoing trade war with China — warned Jim Cramer in a recent interview that China is 'filling the gap we left and growing exponentially.'
'The only way we have a real chance at keeping up here is by using our advantage that we don't have to just rely on people here, we can rely on the best and brightest from around the world,' the IFP's Neufeld said.
'It's disappointing people aren't willing to talk about this,' he said. 'We need a balanced approach if we're not going to just forfeit the technological competition.'
Anthony Adragna, Daniella Cheslow, Gabby Miller and Christine Mui contributed to this report.