The United States Vice President JD Vance has stated that foreign students on student visas may face deportation if their stay is deemed not to be in the best interest of the country.
In an interview with Fox News on Thursday night, Vance emphasised that this move is part of a broader strategy under the Trump administration to increase deportation efforts.
He noted that while some may view this as a matter of free speech, it is primarily about national security and determining who is allowed to join the American community.
Vance further explained that the Secretary of State and the President have the authority to decide if a foreign student should remain in the country, and if they are found to have no legal right to stay, deportation would follow.
He acknowledged that the number of deportations could increase, though the exact figure is uncertain.
Vance stated, “This is not fundamentally about free speech, and to me, yes, it’s about national security, but it’s also more importantly about who do we as an American public decide gets to join our national community.
“And if the secretary of state and the president decide this person shouldn’t be in America, and they have no legal right to stay here, it’s as simple as that.
“I think we’ll certainly see some people who get deported on student visas if we determine that it’s not in the best interest of the United States to have them in our country.
“I don’t know how high that number is going to be, but you’re going to see more people.”
The Vice President also voiced concerns about foreign students occupying spots at prestigious universities, which he argued could have gone to qualified American students.
He suggested that wealthy foreign students, particularly from countries like China, often take spots at elite schools, reducing opportunities for native-born Americans, especially those from middle-class backgrounds.
“A lot of these foreign students, most of them, pay full freight. So sometimes what have you at elite universities like a Columbia or Harvard, you have a well-qualified middle-class American kid from the heartland who doesn’t get a spot in these universities because some Chinese oligarch, who is paying $100,000 a year, takes up that spot,” he said.
“So it’s not just bad for national security, it’s bad for the American dream for a lot of kids who want to go to a nice university and can’t because their spot was taken by a foreign student. It’s certainly something we are looking at,” the VP noted.
The debate on foreign students comes as the United States experiences a surge in international enrollments, particularly from countries like Nigeria, which saw a record increase in student numbers in 2023.
With 20,029 students as of the last academic session of 2023/2024, Nigerians accounted for the seventh-largest source of international students in the US.
