I had seen so much commenting on this I had to read the key parts of the legislation. The legislation deserves a short thread and my read of what Cotton is doing. Let me start while the China engagement crowd is so comically wrong about the level of CCP influence 1/n
on US college campuses, I almost completely agree with them about the importance of providing visas to Chinese students for many reasons. So here is how the legislation reads to me. The first point is exactly as is described halting student visas to Chinese nationals in STEM 2/n
Here is where it gets interesting. The remaining key clauses of the legislation as described by Sen. Cotton's office are a raft of measures that would likely sail right through Congress and attract lots of bipartisan support. For instance, visa waiver for members 3/n
of religious or minority group oppressed by the CCP, expansion of economic espionage definition, and barring universities from employing Thousand Talent Program participants. In other words, these are aspects that would gain broad bipartisan support. So why include such 4/n
Broad visa prohibition which is likely to face such strong opposition from a variety of not just Congress but industry and universities? There are two simple scenarios. First, Cotton and Blackburn really want to block all Chinese graduate STEM students and so attached this 5/n
to common sense broadly supported changes to US legislation and will go down with the ship. Possible but not highly probable. Anti-China legislation is sailing through right now and this language would effectively bar all students. So what is the game? The more likely 6/n
Scenario is that they really want these other things and expect some push back on at least one of them and so included this in the submitted legislation as a bargaining chip to give up in future negotiations. I have no inside information on this specific bill but it has 7/n
no chance of passing the Democratic House as currently written. This makes the probability it was included as a bargaining chip the far and away highest probability scenario.
