Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in an interview on Fox News that Chinese students being allowed to study in the United States and then return to China with that expertise amounts to a “scandal,” and needs to be stopped.
The senator, who made the remarks in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures,” said that such Chinese students only end up going “back to China to compete for our jobs, take our business, and ultimately steal our property and design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people.”
As a result, Cotton said, the United States government should take a “hard look at the visas” currently being handed out to Chinese students. He added that if Chinese students want to come to America, they can “study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers,” but “don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence in America.”
Senator Cotton, who is known for sharing many of the same hawkish stances on immigration as President Donald Trump, was one of the first politicians to note the rising threat of the coronavirus back in early February while impeachment still dominated the national stage. At the time, he also correctly predicted that the virus most likely originated from the Virology Institute in Wuhan, which was called a “conspiracy theory” by left-wing outlets such as the Washington Post, but was later proven to be true.