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Chinese student visa revocations will be crippling

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By scooby

 Chinese student visa revocations will cripple the US in the AI race


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I work in the one of the AI teams at the big G. Most of my colleagues have a PhD and are from China. Beyond them, even a lot of the resumes we receive for research internships are from Chinese candidates in US universities. I'm sure the current administration is not gonna stop at student visas and is gonna target O1, H1B and green card holders next.

A majority of noteworthy papers in AI conferences over the last 3 years have come from Chinese lead authors. Most elite US PhD programs have a majority of Chinese students. If these people were to go back to China, it'd only bolster their already formidable AI industry and be a massive loss for the big US based AI companies.

Chinese PhD graduates already face significant hurdles today getting a green card even after qualifying for the extra-ordinary category (EB-1A). This has already caused a significant number of researchers to go back to China with Deepseek and Qwen teams having a large number of ex-FAANG/OpenAI/Anthropic engineers.

I don't see how the US maintains its lead in the AI race long term if it revokes visas for Chinese students.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Another interesting point. If you look at any top physics, engineering or computer science department they have a large fraction of international, students postdocs and faculty. It is no secret that the most of the very top students in these departments are international. Right now at LANL, we are not even allowing postdocs to travel, it is hard to imagine why LANL would be considered an interesting place to go to do AI. If I was going into AI I would try to go directly into industry or a university tied directly to some industry.

Right how things are rough at Universities with NSF cuts and students cuts however they still have a strong intellectual culture and things could change in 2 or 4 years.
6/01/2025 3:57 PM
Anonymous said…
Maybe a miracle will happen. This could save the US and bring down China at the same time.
6/01/2025 5:24 PM
Anonymous said…


"Maybe a miracle will happen. This could save the US and bring down China at the same time."

Can you go through the logic on this? How would such a scenario play out?
6/01/2025 9:59 PM
Anonymous said…
The question is not whether it's helpful to have international students, but rather how much. Is it good for the country to have 90% of US STEM PhDs be foreign, with a majority from China? When I started grad school, we had a number of Americans and a few Koreans and Europeans. By the time I left, it was almost entirely Chinese, fresh off the boat. I don't think it was healthy. We need balance for intellectual diversity and to provide a pipeline for national security. Federal grants should go entirely to educate Chinese nationals.
6/01/2025 10:33 PM
Anonymous said…
"I don't see how the US maintains its lead in the AI race long term if it revokes visas for Chinese students."

If the AI in America is being generated by Chinese, it's not a stretch to believe that the intellectual property is being transferred back to the motherland as it is being created here.
6/02/2025 8:10 AM
Anonymous said…
" I don't think it was healthy. We need balance for intellectual diversity and to provide a pipeline for national security. Federal grants should go entirely to educate Chinese nationals"

I agree but but why would smart Americans want to go into STEM why on earth would they want to work at LANL? I think a lot of blame can go around as to how we got this point. China and India offer high quality science for cheap, the flood of of PhDs from abroad has lowered the pay and increased the competition from every in the US. A typical school like Kansas State can get plenty of PhDs from top schools vying for a single faculty spot. Industries worth billions can pay relative low wages if the thousands of PhDs are foreign. Even the DOE labs have huge number of foreign PhDs with some programs such as work in batteries is more than 90% Chinese. The other fact is Americans are often seen as inferior, lazy or hard to worth as compared foreign
students.

6/02/2025 8:40 AM
Anonymous said…
Harvard University, the oldest university in the country. Harvard's enrollment is nearly 30% foreign nationals, many of them from China. A common criticism of the US is that American schools produce a limited number of graduates in STEM and leadership related fields, inspiring the claim that the US "needs skilled foreign workers" to continue its edge in business and technology.
6/02/2025 1:31 PM
Anonymous said…
I don't disagree. I tell my kids not to go into science or engineering. Get a BS in a STEM field then an MBA, JD or MD. But no way in hell will I encourage them to get a PhD. It's mostly a struggle and disappointment with no upside.
6/02/2025 6:26 PM
Anonymous said…
I was not clear above about a miracle. I meant that the US would be saved by a collapse of AI in the US and an expansion in China will bring down China. One of the troubles of AI is that it does not, it cannot think. Now the majority of humanity does not think either but you do not want to replace those humans that do think with something that does not. For me in all cases where a very little analysis was needed, AI failed badly. This was about 20% of what I have looked at. So far I have only talked to one medical office, but so far they consider AI useless. Good luck out there, I only have at most 15 years to go and no matter how things go I will not be influenced in any significant way. Oh, sort of related, in that it was computers taking care of me. I recently could not stop my car because the car turned off my brakes. It should not have done that. The new replacement car almost crashed us when the car took over the steering and oversteered. You think I am going to have a self driving car? I will not even use the current cruise control because there are circumstances where it takes over.
6/03/2025 4:26 AM
Anonymous said…
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edmi/pr/chinese-nationals-charged-conspiracy-and-smuggling-dangerous-biological-pathogen-us

Evidently the Chinese were conducting clandestine research into crop blight at the University of Michigan, in a lab not certified to contain the crop pathogen.

Of course, it is not that unusual for postdocs to get fired for having their own research ideas rather than working on funded projects.
6/03/2025 2:02 PM
Anonymous said…
Especially if "your own research idea" is illegally importing a dangerous pathogen to conduct unauthorized research into a bio weapon.
6/04/2025 3:45 AM
Anonymous said…
The high stay-rates of graduates from China and their importance to the U.S. STEM workforce. About 80% of Chinese students who received STEM doctorates in the U.S. were still in the country 10 years later, according to a 2021 study by the National Science Foundation. She also noted that 43% of people in the U.S. science and engineering workforce with doctorates were born abroad, according to the same NSF study.
6/04/2025 8:32 AM
Anonymous said…
The Chinese were doing clandestine research of crop blight in this country? Well, when Trump said he was going to bring manufacturing and research back to the United States, he might not have had this in mind.
6/04/2025 4:16 PM
Anonymous said…
Some of the news on this is a bit misleading, the charges against the Chinese mention this paper on "plant pathogen warfare":

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.03.054

It actually is a paper not on bioweapons, but rather the "warfare" between the plant's immune resistance and the pathogen's virulence. This sort of research can aid in developing crop strains less susceptible to disease as well as improved fungicides.

That is, it could be the actions of the Chinese scientists were simply an attempt to bypass restrictions in order to carry out unauthorized and unfunded research, with perhaps an amoral indifference to the risk of a lab leak.
6/05/2025 5:59 AM
Anonymous said…
The fact that top PhD programs are filled with foreigners is a reflection of the quality of domestic applicants, and the domestic applicant pool won’t magically become better by blocking foreigners. It just means US universities will have to make do with lower quality students. You may also argue that domestic students have more of a right to PhD spots anyways, but that doesn’t make any of what I said false. Btw this does happen at public schools i.e., the bar for admission to a PhD program at a public school is much higher for internationals than it is for domestic applicants.

Blocking foreigners without heavily investing in developing domestic talent is ridiculous, and this is what Trump is doing. In fact with the NSF cuts the administration is actively making this impossible. Wishful reddit comments about the possible benefits of blocking foreigners is even more delusional.
6/05/2025 7:43 AM
Anonymous said…
Blocking foreign students, Chinese or otherwise, is motivated by racism. For details, check out project 2025, the MAGA Bible !
6/05/2025 2:36 PM
Anonymous said…
"For details, check out project 2025, the MAGA Bible !"

Ok, I knew this would be derailed at some point. How is Project 2025 the MAGA bible? I happen to know a number of Trump voters and very few even know what Project 2025 is and the ones that do know about , certainly do not support it. I find this similar to the Qanan conspiracy which would be mentioned all over twitter, MSM and and talk shows yet I never found a single Trump supporter who believed in Qanan. I suspect the project 2025 hysteria is the same thing which is just left wing propoganda.
6/05/2025 4:46 PM
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