When Dwight D. Eisenhower stepped down from his generalship as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe following the Second World War, he became the President of Columbia University.
During his short tenure at the university, a professor approached him and extolled the virtues of European scientists at the institution, to which Eisenhower queried, “They may be talented, but do they love America?” The professor replied, “what does that matter,” to which Eisenhower stated, “that is all that matters.”
Currently, the American Higher Education system has a record enrollment of international students attending its universities, with over 1.1 million foreign students studying in the United States. Over 500,000 of these students are enrolled in our graduate education programs.
While these students provide an important contribution to our higher education system, facilitating cultural exchange and a diversity of viewpoints, the increasing reliance on foreign revenue by America’s higher education institutions is disconcerting.
It is estimated that foreign students contribute upwards of $50 billion to the American economy during their studies in the United States. However, what is less often stated is that China alone steals over $500 billion in intellectual property every year.
Foreign money creates foreign influence, and foreign influence facilitates foreign theft.
[RELATED: Foreign Students Price Americans Out of Their Own Workforce]
As stated in previous articles, international students currently comprise more than 50 percent of the academic cohort enrolled in graduate STEM programs at American higher education institutions, with the majority of these students coming from China and India.
In 2025, India surpassed China in the number of foreign students enrolled in the United States. If one views a graph, the number of international students, especially from China and India, has been steadily increasing since 2001, while the number of foreign students from other regions of the world has remained relatively static.
This is because both China and India are rapidly modernizing their nations in the technological and digital fields, with the explicit goal of increasing economic power and attaining military, weapon, and space indigenization. Both China and India seek to become Great Powers on par with the United States. To accomplish this goal, they must be able to compete in the economic arena and field comparable technological and weapons-based systems to protect their interests. As the United States is the global leader in the STEM fields, both of these nations seek to educate their students in the United States in order to further these goals.
If this process continues, then America will lose its competitive edge in the STEM fields.
It is beyond a reasonable doubt that China poses the greatest threat to American security in the near term, as Pete Hegseth stated in recent comments at the Shangri-La Security Forum in Asia, “The threat China poses is real and it could be imminent.”
Yet India too has long-term strategic goals, and to replace Chinese students in the STEM fields with Indian students does not consider the long-term implications of providing another Great Power rival with the technological education to become a peer rival to the United States.
Many from both the left and right argue that the United States must collaborate with India to counter the rising influence of China. This may be true in some geopolitical respects; however, in many cases, this argument is based upon globalist economics, where American corporations are seeking cheaper markets, lower labor costs, and lower environmental standards in India so as to replace the lost market shares in China.
This is bad for America, its citizens, and the environment. In doing so, reliance on critical manufacturing components is simply shifted to another near-term adversary, creating a long-term risk rather than an investment in advanced American manufacturing that would create national security and increase jobs for American citizens.
However, the critical point here is that the Executive Branch and Congress are often overlooking that replacing Chinese students in the STEM fields with Indian students, whose enrollment is increasing at a rapid clip, merely displaces more American students.
The United States, with a population of about 340 million, is far smaller than China and India, each with over 1.4 billion people. As these countries’ economies and education systems advance, more of their students are likely to apply to U.S. universities, potentially displacing American students. Many of these domestic students may then find themselves in lower-tier jobs, often working under the very international students who took their place, with the justification that the latter are more skilled. This claim is misleading, as it overlooks how American students are denied opportunities to thrive. For instance, Jared Gould has argued that the H-1B visa program is exploited by U.S. employers to hire foreign workers at lower wages under the pretext of a shortage of domestic talent.
we should reject the assumption that foreign nationals are inherently more talented, more qualified, or better educated than their American counterparts. We should also challenge the notion that American workers are undereducated for the jobs being filled by H-1B visa holders—mostly tech jobs—or that employers are merely making a rational business decision … Universities actively grow the pool of qualified foreign nationals for U.S. jobs. In fact, they openly promote the H-1B visa as a selling point for earning an American degree, highlighting special benefits and pathways to the visa for foreign nationals earning master’s or PhDs. By doing so, higher education institutions actively participate in undermining the American public—the taxpayers who fund them.
The influx of international students is one aspect of a broader “great replacement” and “great realignment.” It supplants the American Dream with that of others, treating U.S. students and citizens as expendable, akin to economic markets or supply chains. In this globalist “economics as destiny” model, prioritizing foreign students undermines the futures of American students. Regardless of views on India as a strategic threat, this trend denies domestic students opportunities to lead in technology and digital fields.
[RELATED: H-1B Visa Undermines American Students and Workers]
Seats in high-quality graduate-level STEM programs are a limited commodity. Thus, every seat taken by a Chinese or an Indian student is a net loss for a domestic student. As stated earlier, over 500,000 international students are studying in the United States at the graduate level. Each of these seats represents a letter sent to a homegrown young American telling them that a foreign student has taken their opportunity to increase the profit margins of a university that was originally created to serve American citizens.
The remedy to this very real issue is federal and state legislation, and, barring that, executive orders that cap the number of seats occupied in graduate-level STEM fields by international students and prohibit students from India and China from pursuing STEM graduate studies through a four-year phase-out upon matriculation. Many Democrats support this policy in California; thus, there is a real opportunity for bipartisan legislation. This would permit the time necessary for new federal and state funding legislation to be promulgated, as well as the development of new partnerships with tech and manufacturing firms that would help offset the net revenue loss previously derived from foreign tuition monies.
The onus cannot be placed solely on universities to make the change, as they have a monetary incentive to maintain the status quo and potentially increase international student enrollment numbers.
We are not living in a free market global community as some might posit, but rather in a multi-polar world of Great Power competition with adversaries that are as dangerous if not more so than our adversaries during the Second World War and the Cold War period.
Lawmakers must act and end the open society narrative that falls flat given the current realities. We are living in a new geopolitical era. American corporations and universities must be mandated to work in the national interest and not against it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was right in his reply to the Columbia professor—loyalty to country comes first. It was in this vein of thought that, as President of the United States, he created the National Defense Education Act of 1958 that sought to harness the talents of American students to counter the Soviets following the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Today, we face various adversaries and technologies, yet the logic remains the same—American citizens must come first. The time for lawmakers to act is now.
Image: “Dwight D. Eisenhower visits the construction site of the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor (BGRR) in 1948. At that time, Eisenhower was the president of Columbia University” by Brookhaven National Laboratory on Flickr
This article is ridiculous on the face of it. As noted, the combined Chinese/Indian population is nearly ten times the US population. This means, all other things being equal, there will be ten times as many Chinese/Indians of equal capability as Americans. So if “merit” were the only criteria, then only ten percent of STEM slots would be native Americans. So the author suggests exclusion of foreign nationals. The problem with this is that these nationals will go elsewhere and learn elsewhere–there is no real indication American education is better than other countries–what is better is our scientific infrastructure associated with education (labs and so forth). Other countries don’t have this, but since the Trump administration is decimating these, we will be down to foreign levels soon. Most of those who come will want to stay for opportunities not available in their home countries, and yes, they will love America when they make their home here, marry here, and raise their children here. The US is an assimilationist society, made up of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. That is why we have prospered over other countries.
Our science in the 1960s did quite well with American-born students, and if we cleaned up the mess that American K-12 currently is, we could go back to having American universities full of Americans.
marc, so much truth in what you write.
Ironically, China now sees the Trump attack on American science as the opportunity for China at last to supplant the U S. as the top science power. Including keeping the top Chinese scientists from joining American science.
“merely displaces more American students.”
This is just nonsense. It is a slander against both American science, and Asian scientists too. From someone who “read the law” and doesn’t even have a STEM degree.
It’s even worse — two Chinese “students” were recently arrested for trying to smuggle a fungus called Fusarium graminearum into the country. It can cause a disease in wheat, barley, maize and rice that can wipe out crops and lead to vomiting and liver damage if crops infected with it are then eaten.
When one considers how much fentanyl isn’t caught at the border, one must also wonder how much stuff like this also isn’t caught. And how many of our taxpayer-funded labs are being used to subsidize nefarious stuff like this.
Sputnik jump-started American education and one of the things it produced was the PSSC Physics Curriculum — which could not be taught in our high schools today but was taught to 17-year-old high school students 50 years ago. It, and the math necessary to understand it, was taught in high schools.
We need to teach these courses again — we could even reprint the old textbooks — but it involves a demand that our high school teachers are competent to teach it and today they aren’t. And we also have to admit that not all students are able to understand it and go back to ability level grouping.
But one needs to first ask Eisenhower’s question — how many of our college professors love America?