Marc Levinson

Month: May 2025

  • Cross-purposes

    President Trump, as he has made clear, wants to shrink the U.S. trade deficit. For that reason alone, it’s mystifying that his administration is attacking a sector of the economy in which the United States enjoys a substantial trade surplus.

    I’m talking about education. The administration has decided to crack down on foreign students in the United States by making it harder to get student visas, scouring social media to identify scholars it thinks should be excluded, and revoking thousands of visas of students who’ve been in the country for years. “A visa is not a right. It is a privilege,” Secretary of State Rubio pronounced on May 20.

    Of course no student has a right to a visa. But in addition to other undesirable effects, such as driving away talented scholars who could contribute to U.S. prosperity, clamping down on foreign students directly conflicts with another Trump priority: reducing the U.S. trade deficit. In 2023, the United States ran a $41 billion surplus in education-related trade, most of it due to foreign students’ living expenses and tuition payments at U.S. universities. If fewer foreign students come, either because they can’t get visas or because they choose friendlier destinations, U.S. educational exports will shrink, eliminating jobs in the process.

    As I argue in Outside the Box, the next phase of globalization will have more to do with trading ideas and services than with transporting goods in container ships. By discouraging trade in educational services, the U.S. risks missing the boat.

  • Burner Phones

    A year and a half ago, before a trip to China, I spoke with several people in Washington who know that country far better than I. They all gave me the same advice. My electronic devices would be examined by Chinese authorities the moment I set foot in the country, they warned. I should leave my electronics at home, they said, and take only a burner phone.

    I recalled those conversations a few days ago at a meeting of the Maritime Research Alliance in Denmark. During my trip, I learned that the Copenhagen Business School, one of the country’s leading educational institutions, has advised its staff to bring only burner phones when visiting the United States. If they carry other devices, the university has warned, immigration authorities could inspect the contents and use them as an excuse to deny entry into the country.

    This is frightening. And dangerous.

    At the moment, the U.S. government seems very hostile to foreigners, supposedly in the interest of national security. “Visiting America is not an entitlement. It is a privilege extended to those who respect our laws and values,” Secretary of State Rubio insists.

    This tough-at-the-border attitude is supposedly protecting national security. Over decades, however, nothing has protected America’s national security more than its openness. Around the world there has been a deep well of public sympathy for the United States. Its openness to diverse points of view is one reason people in other countries have sought to visit, study, and do business in the United States. By giving visitors reason to fear that they may be detained by an immigration officer for expressing views that may differ from Mr. Rubio’s or for having a suspect name in their contact books, the United States is doing nothing more than isolating itself from the world.

    The story of the French scientist headed to a conference of space researchers who was turned back by immigration officers at Houston Intercontinental Airport is well known in Europe. Companies, including U.S.-based companies, are discouraging foreign executives from traveling there, especially if they are Muslim or Chinese. “Danes really used to admire the United States,” one Danish acquaintance told me. “Now, not so much.” That ought to worry us much more than a critical sentence on a visitor’s computer.