Trump May Threaten Ban on Chinese Students in U.S. Universities

Plus, Powell the Partisan; Penn; who is Omeed Malik?

Columbia University says it had 9,961 foreign students from China in fall 2023. Photo: The Editors.

Speculation is mounting that a ban on U.S. foreign students at American universities is among the non-tariff means President Trump will use to press Communist China for trade concessions. “We’re gonna make great deals, and we have all the cards,” Trump said at a press conference this week.

China had 289,526 students in the U.S. in 2022-2023, according to Open Doors, which tracks these numbers. The top receiving states are California, New York, and Massachusetts. U.C. Berkeley reports 2,739 students from China in fall of 2023, and Columbia University says it had 9,961 foreign students from Communist China in fall 2023.

In April of 2024 Secretary of State Blinken went to NYU Shanghai and said, “President Biden, President Xi are determined to strengthen our people-to-people ties, including the educational exchanges. We have about – almost 300,000 Chinese students in the United States, and that’s something we very much support.”

Neither Berkeley, Columbia, nor NYU were exactly bastions of Trump support. From the Trump perspective, the pain that the loss of these students and their tuition revenues would inflict on American higher education might be as amusing as watching China attempt to educate its own scientists and engineers. I doubt Trump would actually go through with slamming this door shut, but I would not at all be surprised to see his administration use the threat of restrictions as a “card” in negotiations with China over trade and other matters.

Powell the Partisan: Before Trump got elected, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell was signaling lots of rate cuts. Now that Trump has won the election, Powell is signaling that Trump won’t get the easier monetary policy that had been planned for a President Harris.

Leave it to Powell to wait until after the presidential election to announce that inflation hasn’t been fully conquered. Powell’s timing is like the New York Times finally discovering that the immigration statistics are fit to print.

For Powell, it could be self-defeating. If the Fed chairman throws America into recession because of excessively tight monetary policy, the DOGE crowd will react by cutting government even more, punishing the federal bureaucracy of which the Fed is just one bloated example. “End the Fed” author Ron Paul posted a video saying that “We should wean ourselves off The Fed, like we weaned ourselves off the mainstream media.” Elon Musk quoted it approvingly: “Yes!! Ron Paul ftw,” which is “for the win.”

As the Calafia Beach Pundit, Scott Grannis, noted the other day in a “Headwinds and Tailwinds” post, “inflation is not materially different from the Fed's 2% target. Shelter costs have single-handedly kept headline inflation from falling below 2%,” and much of shelter costs are composed of “owner’s equivalent rent” which is more conceptual than concretely consequential.

The Fed’s mandate is employment and price stability, not serving as an automatic stabilizer by running easier monetary policy to compensate for Democratic anti-growth policies and tighter monetary policy to compensate for Republican pro-growth policies (or expectations of them.) If Powell pushes back too hard with monetary policy against the “America is open for business again” expectations, the public and the Congress may decide that “independent” monetary policy is just a euphemism for in-the-tank-for-the-Democrats. Already the Bitcoin boom is a sign that some market participants prefer decentralization and privatization to the Federal Reserve’s allegedly technocratic central planning. The Fed’s defenders talk a lot about political pressure as a threat to Fed independence. But also a threat are policies and decisions that make the central bank appear partisan.

Who Is Omeed Malik?: The New York Sun has an editorial (“President Tucker Carlson?”) following up on some of yesterday’s coverage here of Tucker Carlson and Jeffrey Sachs. The Sun editorial moves the story forward:

Unremarked thus far has been the role of Omeed Malik. He is the founder and president of 1789 Capital. Axios reported in October 2023 that Mr. Carlson, who left Fox News earlier this year, had raised $15 million from 1789, and that “Malik and Carlson have a long history, as the former banker once backed The Daily Caller, which Carlson co-founded in 2010.” Mr. Malik bought into the Daily Caller in 2020.

As for Donald Trump Jr., our former New York Sun colleague Amanda Gordon, now at Bloomberg, reported last month that Mr. Trump Jr. would be going to work at 1789 Capital.

Back in 2020, the Daily Caller publisher described Malik as “a lifelong Democrat” and “a Muslim American son of immigrants.” There are plenty of pro-American and pro-Israel Democrats and Muslim-Americans. Yet the Carlson-Sachs program is not encouraging, nor are reports in the Wall Street Journal that Carlson and Trump Jr. teamed up to prevent Mike Pompeo from being named defense secretary. (The Wall Street Journal news department waddled in with that piece of news on December 18, “How Tucker Carlson Killed Mike Pompeo’s Hopes of Joining the Trump Administration,” fully five weeks after the Journal’s editorial board did (“Behind Trump’s Mike Pompeo Ban,” November 10.)

Meanwhile at Penn: A Wharton student was temporarily suspended from his post as a board member of Wharton’s Undergraduate Finance Club for sending a message reminding colleagues to vote against divesting Penn’s endowment from Israel. “Hey yall remember to vote no on the undergrad divestment referendum: the commies want to stop us from getting superior risk adjusted returns,” the student, Abraham Franchetti, wrote, according to an account of the events in the Penn Post.

The Penn Post reports:

Franchetti reported that he was told that while he had not broken any written rule, he had “violated the spirit of the code of conduct” and that using the word “commie” was discriminatory. Franchetti also recalled asking Robbins, “do we at Wharton not believe that communism is bad?” and that she laughed and said she did not know and that Wharton as an institution did not have a stance on the issue. He also recalled Robbins noting that his comment could have offended communist members of the Wharton Undergraduate Finance Club.

Noah Rubin, a Penn student who originally flagged the issue, summed up its conclusion by saying, “the student had his position in the club reinstated but the admin who advised he be removed has been promoted.”

My former Crimson and New York Sun colleague Josh Gerstein asks, “Which is more troubling: Penn's ideologically-driven policing or its lack of a sense of humor? (I’d say the latter. Without humor, we're all done for.)”