“It is more well known that Bytedance subsidiaries and TikTok have been potentially abusing the H-1B visa, to bring Chinese nationals into America to work at those so-called American headquarters, where data is supposed to be protected from the Chinese Communist mainland,” Cotton said.
“But I have strong suspicions that it [the data] is actually still accessible, which is a grave threat to American security and privacy, not just today, but for decades into the future.”
Espionage Threat on Campus
According to Cotton, the threat can also come from Chinese nationals studying at U.S. schools.There is a high possibility that family members of those students are affiliated with and supportive of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), he said.
Cotton said that those students tend to enroll in advanced scientific fields, especially at the graduate and postgraduate level, at premier research universities instead of small liberal arts colleges.
“That’s because they’re here on a mission. They are here to exploit wide gaps in security at our universities, and to target programs and departments that have contracts with the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, our intelligence agencies,” he said.
“[They are aiming] at stealing that technology to recruit other assets on those faculties, to commit similar kinds of espionage.”
Cotton said that even if Chinese workers and students on visas don’t intend to engage in espionage they could be bullied into doing so by the CCP.
“If you yourself as a young Chinese national would simply like to get a world-class education at one of our great institutions and don’t really want to spy for the Communist Party, then you’re subject to a lot of pressure and coercion because your family’s still back in the mainland,” he said.
“That’s why you see on university campuses in many cases, the Confucius Institutes become in effect enforcers for the Chinese Communist Party,” Cotton noted, “if they’re protesting, for instance, about Tibet … about the Uyghur people who are subjected to genocide in northwest China, … about Hong Kong.”
Fixing Immigration Policy Loopholes
To counter the risk imposed by the Chinese regime, the congressman called for keeping Chinese students out of the sensitive STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.“It just makes no sense to be training China’s next generation of cutting edge engineers or computer programmers or weapons developers at our own universities, and put at risk the technology we’ve developed at those universities, often in conjunction with the federal government,'' he said.
“There is a finite number of seats at our universities in America and we should first and foremost be focused on American students getting the training they need to succeed in our economy,” Cotton said.
He pointed to Meta, Twitter, and other high-tech companies’ latest layoffs that affected hundreds of immigrants.
“You’ve always heard from Big Tech and Silicon Valley, how there’s not enough tech workers and they’ve got to have all these foreign workers coming in on H-1B visas,” he said.
“I think the last couple of weeks gives a lot of that since every company in Silicon Valley is laying off a third of its workforce, so must not be that much demand,” he said.
Cotton further urged the targeting of Chinese Communist Party officials by “denying visas to their families, denying student visas to their families.”
“So we really need to reorient our entire bureaucracy towards the threat that China poses because there’s not a single department or agency in our government that doesn’t have Chinese influence or Chinese threats, in some ways, touching it, to include our immigration agencies.” he said.
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