A trio of Republican lawmakers have sponsored a bill set to block Chinese students from receiving high-level college degrees in the United States.
One of the sponsors, Senator Tom Cotton, said that, "The Chinese Communist Party has long used American universities to conduct espionage on the United States.” His colleague Senator Marsha Blackburn agrees, saying, “Beijing exploits student and research visas to steal science, technology, engineering and manufacturing secrets from U.S. academic and research institutions.”
These baseless conspiracy theories are a transparent attempt to use the current wave of xenophobia to punish the next generation of college students purely on the basis of their national origin.
It’s detestable -- but Republicans control the Senate, which means the bill has a fighting chance. Maybe it wouldn’t if the elected officials in Congress looked more like the students Republicans want to ban from our colleges -- tell us what you think:
