As tensions with China rise, scientists at America’s leading universities complain of stalled research after crackdown at airports
Stopped at the border, interrogated on national security grounds, laptops and mobile phones checked, held for several hours, plans for future research shattered. ⠀
Earlier this month the Chinese embassy in Washington said more than 70 students “with legal and valid materials” had been deported from the US since July 2021, with more than 10 cases since November 2023. The embassy said it had complained to the US authorities about each case. ⠀
“The impact is huge,” says Qin Yan, a professor of pathology at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut, who says that he is aware of more than a dozen Chinese students from Yale and other universities who have been rejected by the US in recent months, despite holding valid visas. Experiments have stalled, and there is a “chilling effect” for the next generation of Chinese scientists. ⠀
The refusals appear to be linked to a 2020 US rule that barred Chinese postgraduate students with links to China’s “military-civil fusion strategy”, which aims to leverage civilian infrastructure to support military development. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute thinktank estimates that 95 civilian universities in China have links to the defence sector.
Nearly 2,000 visas applications were rejected on that basis in 2021. But now people who pass the security checks necessary to be granted a visa by the State Department are being turned away at the border by CBP, a different branch of government.
“It is very hard for a CBP officer to really evaluate the risk of espionage,” said Dan Berger, an immigration lawyer in Massachusetts, who represents a graduate student at Yale who, midway through her PhD, was sent back from Washington’s Dulles airport in December, and banned from re-entering the US for five years. ⠀
Academics say that scrutiny has widened to different fields – particularly medical sciences – with the reasons for the refusals not made clear.
While I agree that intellectual property has been abused over and over, especially in the last two decades, we need to remember the reason why patents became a thing, and that reason was to promote open research and cooperation.
Without patents the only tool businesses had to protect and exploit their inventions and discoveries was secrecy, which creates a terrible environment for research, full of espionage and subterfuge and without a library of human inventions and research ready for anyone to take and build upon.
It’s somewhat of a necessary evil, a carrot in order to incentivize businesses and individuals to share their research and their inventions, instead of keeping them to themselves in fear of someone else stealing them. It does have issues though, especially regarding the lack of a “fair” use of the monopoly the patent grants for it’s duration.
And, again, I’m talking about patents. Copyright is a whole other can of worms, way worse in some ways.