In 2021, the State Department reported that 1,964 visas were denied to Chinese nationals on account of the presidential proclamation.
In 2021, the State Department reported that 1,964 visas were denied to Chinese nationals on account of the presidential proclamation.
US consular officers are still denying visas to Chinese graduate students based on the schools they attended in China, which has been a policy since May 2020. The policy remains unchanged under the Biden administration, affecting both domestic and international students.
The policy is based on Presidential Proclamation 10043, which prohibits entry into the US for any person from China who holds an F or J visa and is involved with an entity that supports the People’s Republic of China’s military-civil fusion strategy. However, this prohibition does not extend to undergraduate students.
According to the State Department’s report, 1,964 visas were denied to Chinese nationals in 2021 under the presidential proclamation, and only 47 were able to reverse their initial refusal. While numbers for subsequent years are not available yet, the repercussions of the policy continue to be felt.
The National Foundation for American Policy conducted a study showing that barring 1,000 PhD students from attending higher learning institutions in the US could result in a loss of $210 billion to the economy over 10 years, along with nearly $1 billion in lost tuition fees. The reduced value of patents created at universities is one of the major reasons for the economic loss.
Jeffrey Gorsky, formerly the Chief of the Legal Advisory Opinion section of the Visa Office in the State Department section and an advisor for the National Foundation for American Policy, defended the policy by stating that the US government has a longstanding practice of assessing prospective students to prevent any potential transfer of sensitive technologies.
However, an educational official argued that the Trump administration’s decision to restrict Chinese student visas appears to have been made with little consideration of the consequences it might have for students, universities, and US technology innovators affected by Presidential Proclamation 10043.
One student was denied a visa due to their master’s degree from Harbin Institute of Technology, which was featured on the China Defence Universities Tracker, an information source used by the US government to deny visas, as “very high risk/top secret.”
The policy’s repercussions, according to some experts, continued to be felt even after the Trump administration, as it remains in place under the Biden term.
