April 28, 2020
Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) appeared on Fox News Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo and called for the banning of all Chinese students from studying science at American universities.
“In the middle of a pandemic, what’s the most valuable intellectual property in the world? It’s the research that our great laboratories and life science companies are doing on prophylactic drugs, therapeutic drugs, and ultimately a vaccine,” Cotton stated to Daily News.
Cotton is also worried Americans will not be able to compete against Asians in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields because of the number of Chinese and other Asian students studying in the United States in those fields. However, he’s a bit late for that assumption. According to a 2016 report, China graduates 4.7 million students in STEM, annually. That’s compared to the U.S. graduating 568,000 students in STEM, and almost half of them are Asian-Americans.
The workforce in Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are all half Asian, with the CEOs of Google and Microsoft being Asian—Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google. Asia is also home to some of the largest and most powerful tech companies in the world from Samsung, Alibaba, Sony, Huawei to Japan’s Softbank who recently took over American robotics company Boston Dynamics. Softbank controls 99% of all smartphone chips in the world because they also own a microchip processor company, called ARM. ARM’s architectural designs are the basis of all microchip processors in the world. Meaning it doesn’t matter if its Apple, Intel, or IBM; without ARM’s permission, they won’t be getting any processors.
Cotton continued to state to Daily News “Communist Party’s brightest minds” only for them to steal American jobs when they return to China and “design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people.”
“If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America,” continued Cotton.
Feature Images via Senator Tom Cotton & Adweek