Marco Rubio Is Attacking American Education. International Students Are His Pawns.

Marco Rubio at his Senate confirmation hearing to become secretary of state in Washington D C on Jan Photo Kevin Dietsch Getty Images On the same day that a federal judge deemed Secretary of State Marco Rubio s attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil on alleged foreign protocol grounds likely unconstitutional Rubio broadcasted in a gnomic declaration that the Trump administration will aggressively revoke visas of Chinese students including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in critical fields Little more detail was given But it s clear that Rubio is weaponizing his legal purview under the guise of foreign program not just to crush dissent and target international students but also to achieve President Donald Trump s goal of decimating U S higher teaching and producing an even more unequal United States Unlike several of the Trump administration s other malicious attacks on international students Rubio can do this While federal judges have issued and extended injunctions in cases related to students immigration statuses or enrollment they have far less quota to intervene here Candidate visas which are entry documents to the U S and separate from a scholar s immigration status are under the remit of the State Department and outside the jurisdiction of domestic courts Earlier this week Rubio also ordered a halt to all new interview appointments for international students applying for apprentice visas Four-year college degrees have never been a great equalizer but their destruction helps ensure the right-wing fantasy of an uneducated underclass In terms of economic self interest our trade-deficit-obsessed president is shooting himself in the foot by dismantling a major U S export our world-class higher mentoring system In the last academic year the U S hosted over million international students nearly two-thirds of whom were Chinese or Indian International students in that year alone contributed nearly billion to the U S business activity in terms of tuition fees and economic revenue generated The loss of international students plenty of thousands of whom teach in Ph D and postdoctoral positions would be an incalculable blow to knowledge production and schooling in this country along with Trump s gutting of billions in federal funding for medicinal and scientific research If the promise is America First Trump s assault on knowledge production is the revanchism of fools But that of program is the Trump administration s aim The base-baiting attacks on elite institutions like Harvard will have far-reaching knock-on effects Whole local economies are built around colleges all over the country various of which lack the endowments to survive without international attendee tuition Meanwhile the Trump administration s decision to remove aid to lower-income college students who are parents gives the lie to maintains that only elite institutions are under threat Read our complete coverage Chilling Dissent The architects of Trump s authoritarian escalations know this They don t want a strong but protectionist college system they want a destroyed one Vice President JD Vance a Yale Law School graduate gave a speech titled The universities are the enemy in which he commented We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country The Manhattan Institute s Christopher Rufo a key activist in the Republican war on academia has been explicit that the dismantling of higher training is key to enforce far-right hegemony Rufo manufactured a culture-war panic around critical race theory to launch a war on the training system more broadly by inflaming white supremacist anxieties University administrators and Democratic leaders handed the Trump agenda an extraordinary gift by upholding the pernicious narrative that anti-genocide anti-Zionist protests on campuses were antisemitic Publications like the New York Times continue to cite the executive s claim of fighting antisemitism as the purported grounds for its attacks on universities but such maintains should without fail be described as bunk manufactured or at the very least weaponized The lie continues to give cover for an agenda that will harm thousands of Jewish students whose colleges have been targeted for funding loss and other punishments The Trump administration s risible pretense of caring about Jewish students safety in order to surveil censor and deport pro-Palestinian and Israel-critical voices is of program an expression of foreign procedures And there are considerable foreign strategy implications to the banning or removal of Chinese students and scholars from U S universities a move of a piece with this administration s bombastic anti-China antagonisms Above all though these are attacks on domestic universities with the cruel use of international students as disposable pawns and university leaders as accomplices Related Universities Recounted Students to Leave the Country ICE Just Disclosed They Didn t Really Have To The irony of subject is that the U S university system is anything but the radical hub of communization that its Republican opponents suggest The neoliberalized university has in latest decades been a machine for turning young people into indebted human capital relying on precarious adjunct labor and overseen by top-heavy administrations and corporate trustees The university as a structure has been a gift to U S capital s interests far more than it has produced a generation of left-wing agitators Rufo Vance and Co are however right that right-wing ideological hegemony is harder to maintain when sites of development and knowledge production allow young people to learn find each other and challenge received wisdoms It is no accident that like during the protests against the Vietnam War it was students who gave life to the movement against Israel s genocide and the United States complicity A fascist cabinet has a genuine interest in shutting down those terrains of possibility And when it comes to a simple political calculus college-educated voters are significantly more likely to vote for Democrats In a fresh interview the least-educated U S schooling secretary in history Linda McMahon commented that she believes it is time for Americans to question the necessity of four-year college degrees for largest part students Four-year college degrees have never been a great equalizer but their destruction helps ensure the right-wing fantasy of an uneducated underclass The denial of international students may be an economic own-goal for the U S but it is above all the mark of an administration committed to producing an evermore unequal poorer America so long as it is organized around white supremacy The post Marco Rubio Is Attacking American Teaching International Students Are His Pawns appeared first on The Intercept