US Vice President JD Vance has stated that immigrants on student visas will be deported if the US deems that their stay is not in the best interests of the country.
Vance spoke in an interview with Fox News that aired Thursday night.
The vice president said he expects deportations to increase as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the nation.
He noted that Trump has been frustrated with the deportation process thus far, suggesting that the number would increase.
When asked if it would effect foreign students who had legally entered the country, Vance said yes, presenting it as a step to bolster up 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.”
Last year, the United States saw a record increase in foreign student enrolment after other popular destinations such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia implemented stringent visa requirements to reduce immigration.
According to a US government report, Nigerians had the highest enrolment rate.
Nigerians were the seventh-largest source of international students in the United States, with 20,029 students as of the most recent academic session in 2023/2024.
In 2021, the country ranked 11th among countries with the highest number of students from the United States and Africa.