President Donald Trump criticized the nation of France on Monday in a back-and-forth with a Fox News host as he defended the enrollment of Chinese students at universities within the United States.
“I actually think it’s good to have outside countries,” the president stated when requested about enrolling Chinese nationals at American universities.
“They’re not the French. They’re the Chinese. They spy on us. They steal our intellectual property,” Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham responded.
“Do you think the French are better?” the president retorted.
“Yeah,” Ingraham stated.
“I’m not so sure,” the president responded.
There has been some rigidity between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron all through Trump’s second time period. Some of it has centered over Russia’s conflict in Ukraine, in addition to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Macron was the primary Western member of the United Nations Security Council and first G7 nation to announce that his nation would recognize a Palestinian state.
Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the tip of final month whereas the president was touring by means of South Korea. The US president stated that the 2 leaders got here to an settlement on “almost everything.”
Earlier this yr, the Trump administration stated it was going to “aggressively revoke” Chinese pupil visas earlier than finally reversing course on that transfer.
According to the Institute of International Education, China has constantly been one of many foremost sources of worldwide students to the US – roughly 1 in 4 worldwide students within the United States are from China.
For many years, American universities have attracted a few of China’s brightest minds. Seen as a path to a prestigious training and higher profession alternatives, US schools have drawn Chinese students from middle-class households in addition to the political and enterprise elite.
China was the highest supply of worldwide students within the US for 15 straight years till it was surpassed by India simply final yr, in accordance with figures from Open Doors, a State Department-backed database monitoring worldwide pupil enrollment.
After many years of development, the variety of Chinese students within the US reached a peak of over 372,000 within the 2019-2020 college yr, earlier than declining to greater than 270,000 within the 2023-2024 yr – a drop that coincides with the Covid-19 pandemic but additionally rising friction between the 2 governments.