On Monday, the incompetent fascist Donald Trump and team announced new directive declaring that international college students will be losing their U.S. visas, and thus their right to stay in this country, if their coursework at their U.S. colleges and universities is switched to solely online classes. Switching to all-online classes is a very effective way of making sure students Not Die, generally considered a plus at most institutions of higher learning, even as the United States' COVID-19 pandemic rages out of control.
The New York Times has a story making the somewhat dodgy assertion that the Trump team's move was an "effort to pressure universities into reopening." Is it? Is it mostly that? It doesn't seem likely. Instead, that guess seems once again a press reinterpretation of the Trump White House's attacks on immigrants, migrants, and foreign visitors into anything that can be considered less blatantly racist. And if we've learned even one thing about Donald Trump, it's that he has no "strategies" for anything. He's just a cruel and dimwitted racist.
When looking for why the Trump team has "done" anything and everything, presume the simplest explanation is the correct one. Donald Trump's immigration "policies" are authored by white nationalist Stephen Miller, who retains the role despite press revelations that no, he quite sincerely is a white nationalist. Miller, along with a sweeping collection of other Trump-elevated Republican fringe figures, wants to deport foreigners.
A move to deport a large number of foreign students is, then, just a move to deport a large number of foreign students. There doesn't have to be logic behind it. The spiteful assholes of white nationalism have found a powerless group to target, and is targeting them. Donald Trump, whose treasured popularity is collapsing after 130,000 American deaths caused by his own incompetent lethargy, is responding by retreating into his own specialties, conspiracies, and racism. Foreign students can be expelled, someone suggested it, they're doing it.
Look, this is not a movement of deep thinkers.
It is certainly true that Trump's newest racist move would have a secondary financial effect on the marketplace surrounding his target, in this case schools. But in the same way Trump's incompetent and reflexive tariff war with China was a nationalist move that happened to injure, for example, American farmers, the Trump team's nationalist move to expel foreign students injures American targets as a side effect, not a plan. The true attacks on American schools are far more direct.
The workarounds here are, of course, still pretty simple. Requiring foreign students to take one in-person class per semester is trivial, as is inventing a new class to be taught. Perhaps every foreign student needs to take a one-unit patriotic class studying our nation's great and not-at-all insincere Constitution, for example. It could be done, with social distancing and masks. Every conservative who objected to the plan to teach our Greatest Document would, of course, naturally hate America.
Again, though; stop presuming nuance to the Trump White House's actions. Nothing this group of conservative D-listers has ever done would support a notion of anyone on Trump's team being clever. John Bolton left angry because John Bolton wanted to bomb something and didn't get it. Mike Pompeo and William Barr are refusing to testify to Congress because they have been implicated in a crime, and will take every measure possible to ensure they do not have to testify about it under oath. Donald Trump is as dumb as his daily statements indicate. Stephen Miller is devoted, intensely, to pushing white nationalist priorities onto the nation. Ivanka does not actually Give A Damn. Everyone around Trump screwed up the pandemic response because they were selected for scientific illiteracy and ideological devotion.
The press does this sort of thing all the time, writing entire pieces on the premise that something is "seen as" a plan to something-else. They seem devoted to any narrative that allows them to dodge the inherent racism of the current regime's racist moves. Our not just racist, but white nationalist, regime wants to expel foreigners, imprison foreigners, and ban the entry of foreigners, and have consistently and obsessively made moves to do all three since the delusional orange con artist first stepped into the building.