Trump says he welcomes Chinese students, but wants them checked
WASHINGTON (Kyodo) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he welcomes Chinese and other foreign students to study in the United States, but he wants them to be screened more carefully.
"Chinese students are coming. No problem. No problem. It's our honor to have them," Trump said at the White House ahead of a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. "We want to have foreign students, but we want them to be checked."
Trump made the comments in response to a question from the press as to whether he discussed anything regarding Chinese students in his phone call in the morning with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The Trump administration has been tightening the screening of international students, claiming some of them could threaten national security. On Wednesday, he signed a proclamation to suspend student visas for foreign nationals seeking to study at Harvard University.
Identifying China by its formal name, the proclamation warned that "our adversaries, including the People's Republic of China, try to take advantage of American higher education by exploiting the student visa program for improper purposes and by using visiting students to collect information at elite universities in the United States."
The White House also noted that Xi's daughter attended Harvard as an undergraduate in the early 2010s.
In a related development, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week the United States will "aggressively" revoke the visas of Chinese students, specifically those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or those studying in sensitive fields.
Rubio also said the United States will revise visa criteria to step up scrutiny of all future visa applications from China and Hong Kong.
In the 2023-2024 school year, China was the country of origin for the second-highest number of foreign students in the United States, following India, which became the leader for the first time since 2009, according to data from Open Doors, a program sponsored by the State Department.
There were 277,398 Chinese students in the United States in the year, making up a quarter of the total number of international students.
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