Donald Trump signed a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard University, the White House said on Wednesday.
The order would suspend for an initial six months the entry into the US of foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs at Harvard. Trump declared that it would jeopardize national security to allow Harvard to continue hosting foreign students.
The proclamation is the US president’s latest attempt to choke the Ivy League school from an international pipeline that accounts for a quarter of the student body, and a further escalation in the White House’s fight with the institution.
“I have determined that the entry of the class of foreign nationals described above is detrimental to the interests of the United States because, in my judgment, Harvard’s conduct has rendered it an unsuitable destination for foreign students and researchers,” Trump wrote in the order.
Trump’s proclamation also directs the US state department to consider revoking academic or exchange visas of any current Harvard students who meet his proclamation’s criteria.
Harvard in a statement called Trump’s proclamation “yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”
“Harvard will continue to protect its international students.”
Trump singled out Harvard’s connections with China as reason for cutting off the university from foreign students. The proclamation said Harvard was linked to research that “could advance China’s military modernisation”.
The statement also said Harvard was considered the top “party school” for Chinese Communist party bureaucrats and noted that the daughter of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, attended in the early 2010s.
In the early 2000s, Harvard ran a “China Leaders in Development” programme in conjunction with Tsinghua University in Beijing for Chinese government officials.
“I don’t think this is going to benefit US universities at all,” said a Chinese undergraduate student with an offer to study at Harvard on a master’s degree starting next term who asked that his name be withheld. “It’s causing normal people, us students, a lot of anxiety.”
The Trump administration has been engaged in a tense standoff with Harvard, the US’s oldest and wealthiest university, freezing billions of dollars in grants and other funding and proposing to end its tax-exempt status, prompting a series of legal challenges.
Harvard argues the administration is retaliating against it for refusing to accede to its demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.
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Harvard sued after the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on 22 May announced her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which allows it to enrol foreign students.
Her action was almost immediately temporarily blocked by a Boston court. On the eve of a hearing before her last week, the department changed course and said it would instead challenge Harvard’s certification through a lengthier administrative process.
Trump’s order on Wednesday invokes a different legal authority than the earlier move by the Department of Homeland Security. The legal justification for the ban, Trump said, are sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “which authorize the President to suspend entry of any class of aliens whose entry would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”.
Trump officials have repeatedly raised the stakes and sought new fronts to pressure Harvard, cutting more than $2.6bn in research grants and moving to end all federal contracts with the university. The latest threat has targeted Harvard’s roughly 7,000 international students, who account for half the enrolment at some Harvard graduate schools.
“President Trump wants our institutions to have foreign students, but believes that the foreign students should be people that can love our country,” the White House said in a fact sheet about the proclamation.
Wednesday’s two-page directive said Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries” including China.
As well as the spat with Harvard, the White House has pledged to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students across the country, especially those with links to the CCP or in “critical fields”.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
