MAGA lost it after President Donald Trump announced he would allow 600,000 Chinese students into the United States.
In a surprise move, Trump broke from his administration’s earlier hard-line stance to make it harder for foreigners to obtain student visas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had previously urged “aggressively” revoking visas for Chinese students, including those with ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Trump’s U-turn sparked a fierce backlash within his MAGA base. Some of the president’s most loyal allies, including his former adviser Steve Bannon, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, activist Laura Loomer, and Fox News host Laura Ingraham, denounced or questioned the move as a betrayal of the “America First” agenda, arguing it jeopardized opportunities for American students.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
“We should not let in 600,000 CHINESE students to attend American colleges and universities that may be loyal to the CCP,” Greene wrote on X.
“If refusing to allow these Chinese students to attend our schools causes 15 percent 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 [students’] opportunities? We should never allow that,” she wrote.
“If we are only mass deporting 1,000 illegals each day but allowing 600,000 Chinese spies to come to our country, how can we call them mass deportations? Do the math,” Loomer raged on X. “We will never get rid of the millions who came in under Biden. It’s basic math.”
“Any foreign student that does come here ought to have an exit visa stapled to his or her diploma to leave immediately. Give them 30 days,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast on Tuesday. He slammed the White House’s defense of its reversal as “mind-bendingly ridiculous.”
Ingraham shared her disappointment on her show on Fox News. “I just don’t understand it for the life of me,” she said on The Ingraham Angle on Monday. Those are 600,000 spots that American kids won’t get.”
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Monday that Washington’s relationship with Beijing is “very important.”
Trump also reiterated the point in a marathon Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, saying that he told Chinese President Xi Jinping he was “honored” to have students from China in the U.S. and that he “liked” foreigners coming to American colleges.
“And you know what would happen if they didn’t? Our college system would go to hell very quickly,” Trump said. “And it wouldn’t be the top colleges, it would be colleges that struggle on the bottom,” Trump said.
“But we have a tremendous college system, the best in the world, nobody even close—that’s why China sends them here,” he said. “And you can call it an industry if you want, but you’re talking about millions of people and I’m honored to have the students from China come here—and we’re just getting along very well with China.”
The proposed 600,000 students would represent more than double the Chinese student enrollment in the 2023–2024 academic year and far exceed the previous peak of 372,532 recorded in 2019–2020, according to the Associated Press.
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