The value of Foreign Students
(This is an excerpt from Noah Smith’s “NoahOpinion” substack. Click here to read the full article, where he provides evidence to back up these points.)
Trump has the same attitude toward college [admissions] spots that he has toward immigration and imports. To him, everything is just a lump of fixed size — a pie to be divided. In his mind, if you kick out immigrants, the number of jobs doesn’t go down — the jobs just get parceled out to native-born Americans instead. If you ban imports, Americans don’t consume less — they just buy American-made products instead. And if you kick out foreign students, the number of college spots doesn’t go down; American kids just get more.
Of course, Trump is wrong about that, as I’ll explain. But kicking out international students dovetails with a number of other Trump administration priorities. It allows them to strike out at left-leaning universities. It allows them to implement ideological tests for immigrants — something they want to do in general. It allows them to reduce the number of foreigners in the country, which they feel strengthens Western civilization.
And for the China hawks in the administration, it allows them to kick out the Chinese, whom they suspect of being spies . . .
So kicking out foreign students is, in many ways, the perfect policy from the Trump administration’s point of view. The problem is, it’s a terrible policy. But like tariffs, this policy will immediately and needlessly hurt some parts of America, while also leading to a long-term erosion of American competitiveness, innovation, and general economic strength.
There are three basic ways that international students are important for the U.S. economy:
Their high tuition payments subsidize the education of native-born American students.
The money they spend in America helps keep the economies of small towns and cities going.
They are crucial for American innovation and technological strength.