US Vice-President JD Vance says immigrants on student visas will be deported if the United States determines their stay is not in the best interest of the country.
Vance spoke in an interview with Fox News aired Thursday night.
The vice-president said he expects deportation numbers to rise as the President Donald Trump administration ramps up efforts to remove illegal migrants from the country.
He added that Trump has been impatient with the deportation process so far, promising that the numbers would rise.
Asked if it would affect foreign students who gained entry into the country legally, Vance replied in the affirmative, touting it as a measure to beef security.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Vance also blamed foreign students for taking up spots in high-ranking universities at the expense of native Americans.
“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.”
NIGERIANS AMONG THOSE TO BE AFFECTED
Last year, the US saw a record rise in foreign students’ enrolment after other choice destinations like the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia enforced biting visa restrictions to curb immigration.
Nigerians were among the highest enrollees, a US government report found.
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.
In 2021, the country was 11th on the list of countries with the highest number of students in the US and the highest from Africa.
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