As the US and China jockey for dominance, anti-Chinese bigotry is driving visa denials for students and scholars.
By Valentina Dallona & Rose Ying ,
April 18, 2025
Yaorusheng / Moment / Getty Images
Less than 100 days into President Donald Trump’s second term, international academic workers find themselves at the intersection of a crackdown on immigrants and political intrusion into higher education. The Department of Education has stripped several universities of billions of dollars in federal funding over alleged “campus antisemitism” and DEI policies, and has threatened to do the same to others. Over a thousand international scholars are currently facing visa revocations and deportations, some for expressing dissent, but many for reasons unknown.
Arab, Muslim and Latinx scholars are not the only ones facing intensified scrutiny — Chinese scholars also face particular challenges. On March 19, at least six universities received letters from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) requesting information on the enrollment, research involvement and funding of Chinese faculty and students. In the letters, Chinese academics are painted as a “Trojan horse” at top U.S. institutions, here to steal sensitive technologies for China’s military and economic advantage.
These letters escalate anti-Chinese sentiments that have grown across party lines in parallel with the geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. As U.S. policy makers confront what may be the end of the neoliberal order and China’s rise calls into question the role of the U.S. as the sole global superpower, scapegoating China is now bipartisan.
It is not hard to see why blaming China for the devastating effects of neoliberal globalization works: although deindustrialization in the U.S. occurred well before China joined the World Trade Organization, China’s rapid growth coincided with the dismantling of the U.S. industrial base as corporations fled to seek cheap labor and higher returns. Blaming China is now politically convenient for the same leaders who fostered this deindustrialization. In the 1990s, policy makers on both sides capitulated to aggressive lobbying by American companies to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and not subject the renewal of China’s “most favored nation” trade status to strict human rights conditions. Since the relationship between U.S. businesses and China has frayed, condemning China lets politicians deflect blame for widespread economic anxiety and avoid confronting corporate power.
While China’s authoritarianism and its challenges to some sectors of the U.S. and global economy are real, U.S. attempts to curb China’s economy and military have produced policies limiting U.S.-China academic exchange to prevent the Chinese government from allegedly using its citizens as spies. The reality is that these policies have had little impact on espionage but have taken a heavy toll on scholars.
In 2018, Trump’s China Initiative deployed FBI agents on campuses nationwide to counter CCP economic espionage. As then-FBI Director Christopher Wray explained in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in July 2019, the initiative was based on the conviction that China is deploying “a slew of non-traditional collectors … businessmen, scientists, high-level academics, graduate students. People who are not intelligence officers by profession, but who are … working on behalf of the Chinese government.”
The China Initiative investigated hundreds of scholars, many of whom lost their jobs as a result. By 2021, less than 30 percent of cases resulted in convictions or guilty pleas — a staggering discrepancy from the overall federal rate, which sits above 90 percent. The vast majority of scholars were of Chinese descent, drawing strong condemnation for racial profiling. Though the Biden administration ended the program in 2022 after the DOJ itself concluded that it “helped give rise to a harmful perception that … we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently,” Congress has repeatedly tried to revive the China Initiative, and similar programs continued under Biden.
Funding agencies took it upon themselves to do the FBI’s job. The National Institutes of Health, the U.S. government’s main agency for biomedical and public health research, conducted hundreds of investigations that continue to this day behind closed doors. Last year, another top federal funder of scientific research, the National Science Foundation (NSF), pledged $67 million to establish research security centers nationwide, as mandated by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act to bolster the U.S. semiconductor industry. The reality, though, is a web of officers often lacking relevant scientific or academic background, making national security judgements on research they do not understand.
In a context where the very notion of what constitutes a national security threat is largely ambiguous and often overlaps with efforts to preserve the competitive edge of U.S. companies in highly lucrative fields, the disproportionate power of federal funding agencies to dictate what research can be conducted and with whom poses a serious threat to academic freedom and jeopardizes the international scientific collaboration necessary to address the greatest challenges of our time, such as climate change and global public health.
Amid heightened scrutiny over research and funding, Chinese scholars face increasingly stringent visa restrictions. Under Proclamation 10043, issued in 2020, Trump restricted visas for Chinese academics affiliated with institutions linked to China’s “Military-Civil Fusion Strategy.” Over a thousand visas were revoked from Chinese graduate and postdoctoral scholars, some well into their programs. The definition of “military-civil fusion strategy” was left intentionally vague so that “officials [could] expand or change the definitions of what constitutes a threat as needed.” Despite attempts to draw attention to the dangers of such a broad application of this policy, under Biden, U.S. Customs and Border Protection wielded the proclamation heavy-handedly to harass, interrogate and deport Chinese scholars with valid visas at the border.
Since Trump took office a second time, we have seen a new, frightening wave of anti-Chinese targeting aimed at people in academia. Project 2025 doubles down on the vilification of China and Chinese nationals by calling for the revival of the China Initiative through executive action and supporting the discontinuation of visas for Chinese students and researchers. Just days before the March 19 letters from the House Select Committee on the CCP, Congress introduced a bill to ban student visas for all Chinese nationals. A few days later, on March 27, the House passed H.R. 1048, or the DETERRENT Act, a bill that would make reporting requirements for gifts and contracts from countries labeled as “of concern” — China in primis — disproportionately onerous for U.S. academic institutions.
Universities themselves have largely accepted and legitimized the targeting of Chinese nationals, offering little support. The University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), one of the six institutions addressed by the House Select Committee on the CCP, has seen this before. In 2023, UMD received a federal information request on a group of Asian-origin faculty. These professors — many of whom had been U.S. citizens for decades — were later detained and interrogated at airports regarding alleged conflicts of interest in research funding. Although they were eventually released, they were able to trace a direct line between their treatment and the information UMD had provided. United Academics of Maryland-UMD, UMD’s faculty union, is actively organizing to ensure UMD’s response to the House Committee letter doesn’t result in the same outcome — or worse.
The next year, still under the Biden administration, two UMD Chinese graduate students were denied entry at the border, likely due to Proclamation 10043, and faced automatic visa bans in the middle of their degrees. UMD’s International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) — which charges international students extra fees, supposedly for enhanced support — proved inept, at one point ignoring a student for a month during their visa ban appeal. When asked to comment on these cases, UMD declined, citing privacy concerns and federal law.
The UMD Graduate Labor Union-UAW (GLU) rallied around three demands: allow their colleagues to complete their degrees remotely; provide financial help with legal and personal costs; and take proactive action to condemn this anti-Chinese attack and provide guidance to other Chinese students who might be targeted. Organizers launched petitions with thousands of signatures, grilled administrators at public town halls and private council meetings, created Know Your Rights resources and worked with national organizations to collect testimonies for Congress opposing Proclamation 10043.
Because of Maryland law, GLU has limited power as an unrecognized union without collective bargaining rights. Ultimately, neither of the Chinese grads could finish their degrees remotely. Organizers hit dead ends seeking financial help. Eventually, ISSS sent an advisory to Chinese students — a small win considering UMD loathes transparent communication; at the time of writing, UMD’s response to the ongoing crisis has been deeply inadequate, consisting of one brief email to international students only, with standard resources students largely deem insufficient for the magnitude of the issue. GLU has provided emotional and community support that UMD could or would not: the sense that anyone actually cared and was trying to fight this injustice.
Graduate workers across the country have used collective power to force universities to protect international students. For instance, the University of Michigan’s grad union secured assistance funds specifically for international workers through their contract. Several graduate unions organized enough political and legal pressure, including by getting their universities to file a lawsuit, to overturn an ICE directive to deport international students in 2020.
More political pressure is needed to protect Chinese scholars. Currently, bipartisan policy toward China assumes that the only possible global order is one where the U.S. dominates while China is kept in check. This dangerous framework ignores the reality at hand and fuels real harm — targeting Chinese people and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities more broadly, while depriving U.S. academic institutions of the vital talent and international research needed to remain competitive and meet the needs of our historical moment.
While very effective at disrupting the lives of thousands, anti-Chinese bigotry will not solve the current economic and social instability that gave us Trump. Instead, it distracts from real solutions that challenge corporate power and risks furthering corporate influence on academia by subordinating what constitutes “good” and “safe” scientific research to geopolitical calculus.
The latest wave of repression targeting all international scholars is an extension of the policies that have already affected Chinese academics. If we are serious about fighting Trump’s attack on higher education and immigrant communities, academics and institutions must organize collective pressure on Democratic leaders to oppose these initiatives.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Valentina Dallona
Valentina Dallona moved to the U.S. for grad school at Johns Hopkins University, where she founded and led the graduate workers’ union drive. She then became a full time labor organizer, helping thousands of nurses win their union elections. She is currently the Political Director at Justice Is Global, where she works to build support for a progressive U.S.-China policy.
Rose Ying
Rose Ying is a PhD candidate and organizer with the Graduate Labor Union-UAW at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Less than 100 days into President Donald Trump’s second term, international academic workers find themselves at the intersection of a crackdown on immigrants and political intrusion into higher education. The Department of Education has stripped several universities of billions of dollars in federal funding over alleged “campus antisemitism” and DEI policies, and has threatened to do the same to others. Over a thousand international scholars are currently facing visa revocations and deportations, some for expressing dissent, but many for reasons unknown.
Arab, Muslim and Latinx scholars are not the only ones facing intensified scrutiny — Chinese scholars also face particular challenges. On March 19, at least six universities received letters from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) requesting information on the enrollment, research involvement and funding of Chinese faculty and students. In the letters, Chinese academics are painted as a “Trojan horse” at top U.S. institutions, here to steal sensitive technologies for China’s military and economic advantage.
These letters escalate anti-Chinese sentiments that have grown across party lines in parallel with the geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. As U.S. policy makers confront what may be the end of the neoliberal order and China’s rise calls into question the role of the U.S. as the sole global superpower, scapegoating China is now bipartisan.
It is not hard to see why blaming China for the devastating effects of neoliberal globalization works: although deindustrialization in the U.S. occurred well before China joined the World Trade Organization, China’s rapid growth coincided with the dismantling of the U.S. industrial base as corporations fled to seek cheap labor and higher returns. Blaming China is now politically convenient for the same leaders who fostered this deindustrialization. In the 1990s, policy makers on both sides capitulated to aggressive lobbying by American companies to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and not subject the renewal of China’s “most favored nation” trade status to strict human rights conditions. Since the relationship between U.S. businesses and China has frayed, condemning China lets politicians deflect blame for widespread economic anxiety and avoid confronting corporate power.
While China’s authoritarianism and its challenges to some sectors of the U.S. and global economy are real, U.S. attempts to curb China’s economy and military have produced policies limiting U.S.-China academic exchange to prevent the Chinese government from allegedly using its citizens as spies. The reality is that these policies have had little impact on espionage but have taken a heavy toll on scholars.
In 2018, Trump’s China Initiative deployed FBI agents on campuses nationwide to counter CCP economic espionage. As then-FBI Director Christopher Wray explained in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in July 2019, the initiative was based on the conviction that China is deploying “a slew of non-traditional collectors … businessmen, scientists, high-level academics, graduate students. People who are not intelligence officers by profession, but who are … working on behalf of the Chinese government.”
The China Initiative investigated hundreds of scholars, many of whom lost their jobs as a result. By 2021, less than 30 percent of cases resulted in convictions or guilty pleas — a staggering discrepancy from the overall federal rate, which sits above 90 percent. The vast majority of scholars were of Chinese descent, drawing strong condemnation for racial profiling. Though the Biden administration ended the program in 2022 after the DOJ itself concluded that it “helped give rise to a harmful perception that … we in some way view people with racial, ethnic or familial ties to China differently,” Congress has repeatedly tried to revive the China Initiative, and similar programs continued under Biden.
Funding agencies took it upon themselves to do the FBI’s job. The National Institutes of Health, the U.S. government’s main agency for biomedical and public health research, conducted hundreds of investigations that continue to this day behind closed doors. Last year, another top federal funder of scientific research, the National Science Foundation (NSF), pledged $67 million to establish research security centers nationwide, as mandated by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act to bolster the U.S. semiconductor industry. The reality, though, is a web of officers often lacking relevant scientific or academic background, making national security judgements on research they do not understand.
In a context where the very notion of what constitutes a national security threat is largely ambiguous and often overlaps with efforts to preserve the competitive edge of U.S. companies in highly lucrative fields, the disproportionate power of federal funding agencies to dictate what research can be conducted and with whom poses a serious threat to academic freedom and jeopardizes the international scientific collaboration necessary to address the greatest challenges of our time, such as climate change and global public health.
Amid heightened scrutiny over research and funding, Chinese scholars face increasingly stringent visa restrictions. Under Proclamation 10043, issued in 2020, Trump restricted visas for Chinese academics affiliated with institutions linked to China’s “Military-Civil Fusion Strategy.” Over a thousand visas were revoked from Chinese graduate and postdoctoral scholars, some well into their programs. The definition of “military-civil fusion strategy” was left intentionally vague so that “officials [could] expand or change the definitions of what constitutes a threat as needed.” Despite attempts to draw attention to the dangers of such a broad application of this policy, under Biden, U.S. Customs and Border Protection wielded the proclamation heavy-handedly to harass, interrogate and deport Chinese scholars with valid visas at the border.
Since Trump took office a second time, we have seen a new, frightening wave of anti-Chinese targeting aimed at people in academia. Project 2025 doubles down on the vilification of China and Chinese nationals by calling for the revival of the China Initiative through executive action and supporting the discontinuation of visas for Chinese students and researchers. Just days before the March 19 letters from the House Select Committee on the CCP, Congress introduced a bill to ban student visas for all Chinese nationals. A few days later, on March 27, the House passed H.R. 1048, or the DETERRENT Act, a bill that would make reporting requirements for gifts and contracts from countries labeled as “of concern” — China in primis — disproportionately onerous for U.S. academic institutions.
Universities themselves have largely accepted and legitimized the targeting of Chinese nationals, offering little support. The University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), one of the six institutions addressed by the House Select Committee on the CCP, has seen this before. In 2023, UMD received a federal information request on a group of Asian-origin faculty. These professors — many of whom had been U.S. citizens for decades — were later detained and interrogated at airports regarding alleged conflicts of interest in research funding. Although they were eventually released, they were able to trace a direct line between their treatment and the information UMD had provided. United Academics of Maryland-UMD, UMD’s faculty union, is actively organizing to ensure UMD’s response to the House Committee letter doesn’t result in the same outcome — or worse.
The next year, still under the Biden administration, two UMD Chinese graduate students were denied entry at the border, likely due to Proclamation 10043, and faced automatic visa bans in the middle of their degrees. UMD’s International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) — which charges international students extra fees, supposedly for enhanced support — proved inept, at one point ignoring a student for a month during their visa ban appeal. When asked to comment on these cases, UMD declined, citing privacy concerns and federal law.
The UMD Graduate Labor Union-UAW (GLU) rallied around three demands: allow their colleagues to complete their degrees remotely; provide financial help with legal and personal costs; and take proactive action to condemn this anti-Chinese attack and provide guidance to other Chinese students who might be targeted. Organizers launched petitions with thousands of signatures, grilled administrators at public town halls and private council meetings, created Know Your Rights resources and worked with national organizations to collect testimonies for Congress opposing Proclamation 10043.
Because of Maryland law, GLU has limited power as an unrecognized union without collective bargaining rights. Ultimately, neither of the Chinese grads could finish their degrees remotely. Organizers hit dead ends seeking financial help. Eventually, ISSS sent an advisory to Chinese students — a small win considering UMD loathes transparent communication; at the time of writing, UMD’s response to the ongoing crisis has been deeply inadequate, consisting of one brief email to international students only, with standard resources students largely deem insufficient for the magnitude of the issue. GLU has provided emotional and community support that UMD could or would not: the sense that anyone actually cared and was trying to fight this injustice.
Graduate workers across the country have used collective power to force universities to protect international students. For instance, the University of Michigan’s grad union secured assistance funds specifically for international workers through their contract. Several graduate unions organized enough political and legal pressure, including by getting their universities to file a lawsuit, to overturn an ICE directive to deport international students in 2020.
More political pressure is needed to protect Chinese scholars. Currently, bipartisan policy toward China assumes that the only possible global order is one where the U.S. dominates while China is kept in check. This dangerous framework ignores the reality at hand and fuels real harm — targeting Chinese people and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities more broadly, while depriving U.S. academic institutions of the vital talent and international research needed to remain competitive and meet the needs of our historical moment.
While very effective at disrupting the lives of thousands, anti-Chinese bigotry will not solve the current economic and social instability that gave us Trump. Instead, it distracts from real solutions that challenge corporate power and risks furthering corporate influence on academia by subordinating what constitutes “good” and “safe” scientific research to geopolitical calculus.
The latest wave of repression targeting all international scholars is an extension of the policies that have already affected Chinese academics. If we are serious about fighting Trump’s attack on higher education and immigrant communities, academics and institutions must organize collective pressure on Democratic leaders to oppose these initiatives.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Valentina Dallona
Valentina Dallona moved to the U.S. for grad school at Johns Hopkins University, where she founded and led the graduate workers’ union drive. She then became a full time labor organizer, helping thousands of nurses win their union elections. She is currently the Political Director at Justice Is Global, where she works to build support for a progressive U.S.-China policy.
Rose Ying
Rose Ying is a PhD candidate and organizer with the Graduate Labor Union-UAW at the University of Maryland, College Park.
