Experts Who Warn of Risks Posed by Chinese Students Are Skeptical of Trump Plan

The F.B.I. has spent decades investigating some professors and students from China suspected of using their studies to secretly spy for their home country. As the Trump administration tries a new, more aggressive effort to stop such activity, experts fear it will do more harm than good for American research.

The plans the State Department announced this past week to revoke visas of some Chinese college students strike even some former spy-hunters as a heavy-handed attempt to solve a more complicated problem.

“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,” said Greg Milonovich, a former F.B.I. agent who managed the counterintelligence division’s academic alliance program as well as the national security higher education advisory board.

In announcing the move late Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave few specifics, offering only that the U.S. government would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”

How that vaguely defined standard will be enforced is not yet clear, but the directive is part of a broad campaign by the Trump administration to force major changes in American higher education. College campuses, administration officials say, are in crisis, and only the federal government is willing and able to fix the problems.

The senior White House adviser Stephen Miller outlined on Friday what the administration viewed as a threat to its interests. “We’re not going to be awarding visas to individuals who have a risk of being engaged in any form of malign conduct in the United States, which of course would include espionage, theft of trade secrets, theft of technology or other actions that would degrade the security of our industrial base,” he said.