During an interview aired on Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” President Donald Trump argued that refusing Chinese students would be “a very insulting thing to say to a country.” And would harm the American university system.
Trump said, [relevant remarks begin around 8:20] “As far as the students, it’s 500,000 students that come, good students. I could tell them I don’t want any students. It’s a very insulting thing to say to a country. They would then immediately go out and start building universities all over China. … But if you want to see a university system die, take a half a million people out of it. And the ones that won’t be hurt are the top schools. The top schools will do fine. But your lower schools, your lower — the ones that don’t do quite as well, those schools, they’ll be dying all over the place.”
Host Sean Hannity then said, “I think people would argue, they worry about do they have nefarious intentions.”
Trump responded, “Sure, I know, and we worry about that. And, honestly, they do things to us and we do things to them. It’s a very, very fine line, the whole thing with students. So, they have 500,000 students, and our university system does great, it does great, you want to screw it up? Take a half a million students out. And you’re going to see bankruptcies at the lower end of good colleges, but they’re not known or whatever, you’re going to have a lot of problems. So, it’s something I’m always looking at. But it’s a very insulting thing to tell a country we don’t want your people in our schools, it really is. Now, a lot of people say, oh, that’s a terrible thing, it is a very insulting thing. … But I will tell you that school systems don’t want that to happen, because you won’t have much of a school system.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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