Trump's visa crackdown will scare future world leaders off US campuses

Here’s yet another way in which President Donald Trump is making America neither Great Again nor strong, but weaker, and for a long time to come: He’s sabotaging the US-centered transnational intellectual and personal networks that have amplified American power, by breaking the pipeline of future leaders of foreign countries who were educated and shaped in the United States.

His administration was doing that by expelling, harassing or intimidating foreigners at US universities. It revoked the visas of more than 1,400 international students on American campuses. In some cases, the government alleged that students were pro-Palestinian protestors, in others that they committed “crimes,” even if those turned out to be unpaid parking tickets or non-existent. Many of the revocations had no clear rationale at all. As part of the specific showdown between the White House and Harvard University, the administration even threatened to stop the institution from enrolling international students altogether.

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That caused enough lawsuits and chaos — have we seen this phenomenon before in this administration? — that the government last week promised to restore due process to its review of student visas. Whether it does or not, though, the damage may already be done.

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No matter how many students this bureaucratic jihad ultimately forces to go home, it will dissuade myriad other young talents abroad from applying to study in America in the first place. Why should they subject themselves to legal risk or hostility (on top of America’s outlandish tuition costs) when they could instead get their degrees in Canada, the UK, Australia, China or some other place? And among those bright young things forming new ideas, expertise and friendships outside rather than inside of the US will be some of tomorrow’s world leaders.

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To grasp what America in the coming years will miss out on, consider the subtle but influential webs of soft power that have long been among the boons of America’s status as an educational superpower.

When covering the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, or again the global one of the late aughts, I often heard that negotiations among the various countries and institutions went better than expected — and better for the US, in particular — because a lot of the people in the meetings had spent time on the same campuses, studied under the same professors or even sat in the same classrooms. They wore different garb and spoke English in different accents. But they shared, for better or worse, the language and mentality of, say, Harvard’s Kennedy School, or the economics departments at MIT or the University of Chicago.

Mario Draghi, for example, has been an Italian and a European central banker (as well as a prime minister of Italy), just as Raghuram Rajan ran India’s central bank and the research side of the International Monetary Fund, among other things. But both got their PhDs at MIT, and were influenced by Stanley Fischer, a titan of finance (and himself a former central banker of Israel). As a professor at MIT, Fischer in fact mentored future central bankers on most continents except Antarctica, from Australia to Brazil and Japan. Mark Carney, a former central-bank governor in Britain and Canada (and Canada’s current prime minister), is not among them — he went to Harvard instead.

In some cases, these biographies make for stories of stunning success for the individuals as for the world and the host country, the US. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a Nigerian who studied at Harvard and MIT, then went on to reform Nigeria’s economy in two stints as finance minister, before working at the World Bank and running the World Trade Organization. She’s still Nigerian, but now a US citizen as well.

The list of US-educated heads of state is also long. For ambitious Latin Americans and Africans, a stint or two on an American campus is practically a rite of passage. The founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, sent his younger son to Stanford and the elder to Harvard’s Kennedy School; that one later became Singapore’s third prime minister. Taiwan’s current president got his master’s degree from Harvard; his predecessor got hers from Cornell.

The Jordanian king also studied in America (Georgetown), as did much of his policy elite. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, did not, but that makes him an outlier among Saudi royals. The Israelis love to to take a swing through an American campus or two, including the incumbent prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (MIT and Harvard). On it goes, from Moldova to South Korea and Indonesia, where the current president did not study in the US but his influential finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, did (University of Illinois); she has called her American years formative.

Whether an American education always makes foreign leaders more pro-American or pro-Western, or even just more capable, is moot. At a minimum, though, it lets international students see the world and their own countries through American eyes, narratives, metaphors and references. It gives them a literal and figurative vocabulary with which they will later run international organizations or negotiate with the White House. The scholar Joseph Nye defined soft power as the ability to get others to want what you want. To the extent that a US education gets others to think as Americans think, it is the ideal tool of soft power, if you choose to see it that way.

There are of course many other reasons for the US to host international students — about a million a year as of last count. Foreigners who study in America go on to invent and pioneer new technologies and business models at disproportionate rates, and most do it in and for the US. If the Trump administration pushes them away, those talents will innovate in and for China instead, or other adversaries and competitors.

But the ability to form intellectual and personal networks across the world is enough reason to keep American education cosmopolitan, as opposed to barricading the ivory tower and closing American minds. In that way, education is like trade: enriching when it’s open, corrosive when it closes.

The benefits I’m describing pay out slowly, admittedly, and Trump isn’t known for his attention span or long-term planning. But some rewards can be immediate, even if hard to quantify. Bilal Erdogan (Indiana University and Harvard) has surely talked at least some sense about America into his father, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And as relations between the US and China become ever tenser, it surely helps both countries that Xi Jinping can turn to his daughter Mingze for discreet pointers about the Yanks. She too reportedly went to Harvard, though under an alias. Little else is publicly known, not even whether she paid all her parking tickets.