President Donald Trump used his authority over the nation’s borders Wednesday to deny F-1 education visas to foreigners seeking places at Harvard University.
The no-visas policy damages Harvard’s claim to be a center for global elites, and was imposed after Harvard officials filed a lawsuit against Trump’s demand the university show it is complying with Americans’ civil rights laws.
The White House’s statement says:
The Proclamation suspends the entry into the United States of any new Harvard student as a nonimmigrant under F, M, or J visas.
It directs the Secretary of State [Marco Rubio] to consider revoking existing [emphasis addded] F, M, or J visas for current Harvard students who meet the Proclamation’s criteria.
The M and F visas are used by more than 400,000 migrants each year to get white-collar work permits via the quasi-legal Curricular Practical Training and the Optional Practical Training programs. Those programs are a springboard for migrants seeking to get white-collar H-1B visas, U.S. careers, and U.S. citizenship. The J visa is often used by migrants who want to displace Americans from jobs at universities’ science laboratories.
Roughly one-in-four Harvard students are migrants, reducing ordinary Americans’ access to prestigious educational qualifications. In 2024, roughly 6,800 migrants were given spaces sought by hard-working Americans.
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“This is yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights,” a Harvard official told CNN.
“This is war on Elite Human Capital, [so] there’s no greater priority than stopping these [Trump] people,” complained pro-migration blogger Richard Hanania.
The policy is “clearly represents punitive extortion rather than any seriously thought-through policy to promote national security,” complained Lawrence Summers, a pro-migration former president of Harvard. “Yes, Harvard should make a variety of changes, but extortion is the wrong way to bring them about,” he wrote.
The White House statement explained Trump’s priorities:
HARVARD HAS A DEMONSTRATED HISTORY OF CONCERNING FOREIGN TIES AND RADICALISM:
- The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has long warned that foreign adversaries take advantage of easy access to American higher education to steal information, exploit research and development, and spread false information.
- …
- Harvard has also developed extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries, receiving more than $150 million from China alone. In exchange, Harvard has, among other things, hosted Chinese Communist Party paramilitary members and partnered with China-based individuals on research that could advance China’s military modernization.
- The Chinese Communist Party has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to study at U.S. institutions, with Harvard University considered the top “party school” outside the country. Xi Jinping’s own daughter attended Harvard as an undergraduate in the early 2010s.
- Harvard has failed to adequately address violent anti-Semitic incidents on campus, with many of these agitators found to be foreign students.
- Harvard has persisted in prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in its admissions, denying hardworking Americans equal opportunities by favoring certain groups, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against its race-based practices.
- These concerns have compelled the Federal government to conclude that Harvard University is no longer a trustworthy steward of international student and exchange visitor programs.
HOLDING HARVARD ACCOUNTABLE: President Trump wants our institutions to have foreign students, but believes that the foreign students should be people that can love our country.
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President Trump: “The students? Well, we want to have great students here. We just don’t want students that are causing trouble. We want to have students. I want to have foreign students.”
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President Trump: “We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can’t get in because we have foreign students there. But I want to make sure that the foreign students are people that can love our country.”
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President Trump: “We are still waiting for the Foreign Student Lists from Harvard so that we can determine, after a ridiculous expenditure of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country. Harvard is very slow in the presentation of these documents, and probably for good reason!”
Harvard has filed a lawsuit to prevent Trump from curbing its inflow of tuition-paying migrants. The lawsuit says:
Yesterday, the government abruptly revoked that certification without process or cause, to immediate and devastating effect for Harvard and more than 7,000 [foreign] visa holders.
…
With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission … Effective immediately, most of Harvard’s thousands of enrolled [foreign] F-1 and J-1 visa students (and their more than 300 dependents) will have little choice but to secure transfer to another school or risk being rendered without lawful status in the United States …
“Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” Harvard insisted.
Pro-migration groups are trying to recruit U.S. and foreign college graduates to lobby for the inflow of more college migrants.
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