On the same day that a federal judge deemed Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil on alleged “foreign policy” grounds likely unconstitutional, Rubio announced in a gnomic statement that the Trump administration will “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with “ties to the Chinese Communist Party” or who are studying in “critical fields.” 

Little more detail was given. But it’s clear that Rubio is weaponizing his legal purview, under the guise of foreign policy, not just to crush dissent and target international students — but also to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of decimating U.S. higher education and producing an even more unequal United States.

Unlike some of the Trump administration’s other malicious attacks on international students, Rubio can do this. While federal judges have issued and extended injunctions in cases related to students’ immigration statuses or enrollment, they have far less capacity to intervene here. Student visas, which are entry documents to the U.S. and separate from a student’s immigration status, are under the remit of the State Department and outside the jurisdiction of domestic courts. Earlier this week, Rubio also ordered a halt to all new interview appointments for international students applying for student visas. 

Four-year college degrees have never been a great equalizer, but their destruction helps ensure the right-wing fantasy of an uneducated underclass.

In terms of economic self interest, our trade-deficit-obsessed president is shooting himself in the foot by dismantling a major U.S. export: our world-class higher education system. In the last academic year, the U.S. hosted over 1.1 million international students, nearly two-thirds of whom were Chinese or Indian. International students in that year alone contributed nearly $44 billion to the U.S. economy in terms of tuition fees and economic revenue generated. The loss of international students, many thousands of whom teach in Ph.D. and postdoctoral positions, would be an incalculable blow to knowledge production and education in this country — along with Trump’s gutting of billions in federal funding for medical and scientific research. If the promise is “America First,” Trump’s assault on knowledge production is the revanchism of fools. 

But that, of course, is the Trump administration’s aim.

The architects of Trump’s authoritarian escalations know this. They don’t want a strong but protectionist college system, they want a destroyed one. Vice President JD Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, gave a 2021 speech titled “The universities are the enemy,” in which he said, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, a key activist in the Republican war on academia, has been explicit that the dismantling of higher education is key to enforce far-right hegemony. Rufo manufactured a culture-war panic around “critical race theory” to launch a war on the education system more broadly by inflaming white supremacist anxieties. 

University administrators and Democratic leaders handed the Trump agenda an extraordinary gift by upholding the pernicious narrative that anti-genocide, anti-Zionist protests on campuses were antisemitic. Publications like the New York Times continue to cite the government’s claim of fighting antisemitism as the purported grounds for its attacks on universities, but such claims should without fail be described as “bunk,” “manufactured,” or at the very least “weaponized.” The lie continues to give cover for an agenda that will harm thousands of Jewish students whose colleges have been targeted for funding loss and other punishments. 

The Trump administration’s risible pretense of caring about Jewish students’ safety in order to surveil, censor, and deport pro-Palestinian and Israel-critical voices is, of course, an expression of foreign policy. And there are significant foreign policy implications to the banning or removal of Chinese students and scholars from U.S. universities, a move of a piece with this administration’s bombastic anti-China antagonisms. Above all, though, these are attacks on domestic universities, with the cruel use of international students as disposable pawns and university leaders as accomplices. 

The irony, of course, is that the U.S. university system is anything but the radical hub of communization that its Republican opponents suggest. The neoliberalized university has in recent decades been a machine for turning young people into indebted human capital, relying on precarious adjunct labor, and overseen by top-heavy administrations and corporate trustees. The university as a structure has been a gift to U.S. capital’s interests far more than it has produced a generation of left-wing agitators. 

Rufo, Vance, and Co. are, however, right that right-wing ideological hegemony is harder to maintain when sites of education and knowledge production allow young people to learn, find each other, and challenge received wisdoms. It is no accident that, like during the protests against the Vietnam War, it was students who gave life to the movement against Israel’s genocide and the United States’ complicity. A fascist government has a genuine interest in shutting down those terrains of possibility. And when it comes to a simple political calculus, college-educated voters are significantly more likely to vote for Democrats. 

In a recent interview, the least-educated U.S. education secretary in history, Linda McMahon, said that she believes it is time for Americans to question the necessity of four-year college degrees for most students. Four-year college degrees have never been a great equalizer, but their destruction helps ensure the right-wing fantasy of an uneducated underclass. The denial of international students may be an economic own-goal for the U.S., but it is above all the mark of an administration committed to producing an evermore unequal, poorer America, so long as it is organized around white supremacy.