During the 2023-2024 school year, over 1.1 million foreign students were enrolled at American universities, a nearly 7 percent increase in foreign student enrollment from the year prior. However, Republican lawmakers are looking to reverse that trend as the Trump administration increases barriers to higher education for foreign students and immigrants in the U.S.
Now, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, is proposing legislation to completely bar foreign students from select countries considered “adversaries” from attending American universities, claiming that foreign enrollment is preventing American students from being accepted.
Tuberville’s “Student Visa Integrity Act of 2025” would ban any student from China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia or Venezuela from attending an American institute of higher education. The bill would also give the U.S. Secretary of State the authority to add any other country to that list at their discretion.
Despite the bill’s stated focus of protecting national security interests from foreign adversaries, the legislation would also bar all foreign students from transferring schools or changing their program of study when attending school in the U.S. It would also mandate that all foreign students have a “definitive end date to prevent visa overstays” and require “in-person interviews for some foreign students.”
Additionally, the bill would institute the tracking of foreign students’ tuition payments, require schools to “disclose any dealings with the Chinese government,” and increase criminal penalties for schools and officials “found engaging in visa fraud.”
On Thursday, Tuberville released an official statement regarding the bill in which he called on the U.S. to “go on offense” against its adversaries.
“I was recently shocked to learn how many students from hostile countries like China and Iran are studying at our American universities—including in my home state of Alabama,” Tuberville said. “We need to go on offense against countries who hate us and are desperate to try to take us down—as we saw with the violent, anti-American protests on our college campuses over the past few months. There is zero reason why we should be allowing students from countries that hate us to take the spot of a law-abiding American citizen at our elite colleges and universities. I’m proud to introduce the Student Visa Integrity Act to crack down on rampant abuse of student visas and to make our American Universities Prioritize Americans Again.”
Tuberville expanded on the legislation further in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo.
“We are funding our own demise,” Tuberville said during the appearance. “[1.1 million] foreign nationals in our university (sic), it’s growing every day. Our enrollment is actually dropping, Americans are not going to universities anymore, they can’t get in. And so we have to do something about this.”
“I’m trying to help President Trump by starting this act to redo this mandate… and say ‘listen, no more Iranian or Chinese nationals in our universities.’ We have to watch funding and dealings to our university (sic), they have to report that. We have to do everything we possibly can to penalize universities that drop the ball on this agenda, because if we don’t do that, we are not going to educate our kids and we’re going to fund our own demise,” the senator added.
In making the case for his legislation, Tuberville also made a conspiratorial claim that Democrats may be encouraging foreign students to illegally vote in American elections.
“[Democrats] don’t want to upset the apple cart with their base, and their base is really for any foreign national coming here, educating, staying past their visas, possibly getting them to vote,” Tuberville said.
The claim that Democrats purposefully allow migrants to enter or stay in the U.S. illegally so they can participate in American elections has been repeatedly debunked and has strong ties to the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
Tuberville also falsely claimed that foreign students do not have to pay U.S. taxes during his Fox Business appearance. While foreign students on F-1 visas may not always owe taxes, many do pay taxes on income made from U.S. sources, including scholarships.
The senator went on to reemphasize his fear that foreign students are being used as intelligence assets by adversaries like China and Iran to compromise American national security.
“All these Chinese come over here, now they all leave their visa on time and they’ll go back home, but they take everything they possibly can with them in terms of anything that they learn,” Tuberville said.
“We want to make sure we limit the number that comes in, but we surely want to limit our adversaries; we want to do away with Iran, North Koreans, or Chinese nationals getting into this country and learning how to destroy the United States of America and our allies,” he added.
Ironically, a recent report from the BBC finds that Chinese students who study in the U.S. face accusations of being American spies when they return home to China to seek employment. Former intelligence officials also warn that barring Chinese students from studying in the U.S. in the name of national security could be counterproductive and ultimately harm American industry.
“The overall number of People’s Republic of China students that actually pose some type of national security risk is relatively low compared to the number of students that will continue to support and further U.S. research,” Greg Milonovich, a former FBI agent, recently told The New York Times.
Tuberville’s bill also comes just mere months after Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian national studying at the University of Alabama, was taken from his Tuscaloosa home and held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for 40 days before electing to deport himself back to Iran. Doroudi was labeled as posing “significant security concerns” by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security despite a lack of evidence suggesting that he was a threat.
For now, the Student Visa Integrity Act awaits assignment to a Senate committee for further consideration.
