Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) is sounding the alarm regarding Chinese nationals training in the United States to become pilots, a fact that was first revealed in New York Times bestselling author and Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer’s new book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon.
He is sending a letter to the Transportation Security Administration about the issue, National Review reported Friday, because those trainees could become assets to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military and meet its demand for pilots.
Banks wrote in the letter:
Each Chinese citizen trained at an American flight school helps break through China’s pilot bottleneck. While many of these students will go on to civilian and not military careers, the Chinese Communist Party, through its Military-Civil Fusion strategy, has foreclosed our ability to view this training with the benefit of a doubt. The more Chinese citizens there are with aviation training, the more options the Chinese military has to recruit pilots and instructors for its malign purposes.
Schweizer detailed in The Invisible Coup how the CCP is using America’s “openness and generosity against us” by sending thousands of trainees to the United States to become pilots.
Breitbart News reported in January:
“The People’s Republic of China has a pilot problem,” the investigative journalist writes in The Invisible Coup. “Beijing needs five thousand pilot cadets every year to meet the demand for both military and civilian pilots. Because the Chinese military tightly controls the country’s airspace, it can domestically produce only about 1,200 pilots a year. So, Beijing quietly erected a system to train three thousand of them a year in the United States.”
“Across the US, at least sixteen flight schools, operating out of taxpayer-funded airports, are training Chinese cadets—sometimes without disclosing their foreign military ties,” he continues. “They do so by sending future military pilots to the United States posing as civilians to learn how to fly.”
During an interview on “The Alex Marlow Show” in January, Kingsley Wilson, the press secretary for the Department of War, spoke about the book and said it is “unacceptable” America is training Chinese pilots.
“That kind of behavior is unacceptable. And we, of course, work in concert with our interagency partners, whether it’s the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security, to make sure that if we uncover any of that activity, we refer it quickly to law enforcement authorities that can act on it,” she said.
Banks concluded his letter by stating:
Therefore, I respectfully request that TSA update the Flight Training Security Program to preclude individuals from foreign adversary nations, such as China, from attending flight training schools in the United States. We must ensure that American flight training programs serve American interests—not Xi Jinping’s dreams.
In a social media post on Friday, Schweizer praised Banks’ decision to take action:
“Fantastic to see Senator Jim Banks take up the threat I mentioned in ‘The Invisible Coup’: the fact that Chinese pilots are being trained in the United States at private flight schools,” he wrote in the post.
Peter Schweizer’s The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and is available to purchase here.
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