Threatened revocation of Chinese students’ visas

On May 28, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced plans to revoke some existing Chinese students’ visas and ramp up scrutiny of new visa applicants from China and Hong Kong. In a statement, Rubio said the State Department would work with the Department of Homeland Security to “aggressively revoke” the visas of Chinese students in the United States, “including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”

Both CNN and The Boston Globe interviewed Mount Holyoke College’s Ruth Lawson Professor of Politics and Carol Hoffmann Collins Director of the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives Kavita Khory about this latest development and what it could mean for international students who want to study in the U.S.

About 21% of the College’s student body comes from other countries, Khory told The Boston Globe. There are 140 first-year international students enrolled in the incoming class, and 50 of them have already secured their visas.

With all the confusion caused by Rubio’s announcement, however, it is unclear how many student visas the federal government will honor. The U.S. is “creating a significant level of skepticism and doubt about our own documents: ‘I have a visa, but will I actually be able to come in?’” Khory said.

President Trump has suggested that if colleges and universities were to accept fewer international students, American students would take their places. But Khory told CNN it’s not that simple.

“It’s not the zero-sum game the way the Trump administration has been presenting it, ‘If you have fewer international students, you will bring in more domestic students.’ That’s not how this works,” she said.

Read the CNN story.

Read The Boston Globe article. This article requires a subscription.