(José Niño, Headline USA) President Donald Trump mounted a forceful defense of Chinese student visas on Fox News, cautioning that expelling half a million foreign students from American campuses would cripple universities across the country, Breitbart News reported.
During his Thursday appearance on “Hannity,” Trump resisted pressure to curtail Chinese enrollment at American institutions, casting such action as both diplomatically damaging and financially destructive.
“As far as the students, it’s 500,000 students they come—good students. I could tell them, ‘I don’t want any students,’ is a very insulting thing to say to a country,” Trump stated. “They would then immediately go out and start building universities all over China.”
The president recognized that his stance might catch some allies off guard. “I frankly think that it’s good that people come from other countries and they learn our culture, and many of them want to stay here. I think it’s good. Not everybody agrees with me, and it doesn’t sound like a very conservative position,” he remarked. “And I’m as conservative—I’m a conservative guy. I’m really a common sense guy, I think, more than a conservative. I think MAGA is common sense.”
Trump stressed that prestigious universities would weather a foreign student prohibition but that lesser known schools would face disaster. “You want to see a university system die, take a half a million people out of it,” he cautioned. “The top schools will do fine, but your lower schools, your lower—the ones that don’t do quite as well—those two, they’ll be dying all over the place.”
When Hannity mentioned worries that certain foreign students might possess “nefarious intentions,” Trump accepted the premise but implied that intelligence gathering occurs on both sides.
“Sure, I know, and we worry about that, and honestly, you know, they do things to us, and we do things to them. It’s a very fine line, the whole thing with students,” Trump replied.
The president circled back multiple times to the financial and diplomatic fallout that would follow any enrollment restrictions. “You want to screw it up, take a half a million students, and you’re gonna see bankruptcies at the lower end of good colleges—but they’re not known or whatever,” he explained. “You’re gonna have a lot of problems.”
Trump further observed that colleges themselves resist such measures. “It’s something I’m always looking at, but it’s a very insulting thing to tell a country, ‘We don’t want your people in our schools.’ I mean, it really is,” he added. “School systems don’t want that to happen because you won’t have much of a school system.”
The comments position Trump awkwardly relative to immigration hawks within his own movement who have demanded stricter oversight of Chinese nationals enrolled at American universities, especially those pursuing studies in sensitive fields tied to national security.
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
