How a US clampdown affected mainland Chinese, Hong Kong student visa numbers

A consultant has said the impact of US President Donald Trump’s policy has been short-lived.

Photo: AP A US clampdown on visas for mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students last May led to year-on-year declines of 42 per cent and 35 per cent in the number of permits granted, but a consultant has said the impact has been short-lived.

One PhD student from the mainland said US President Donald Trump’s actions had led to him giving up an offer to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to enrol at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) last year after he found America’s once-vibrant academic atmosphere tarnished by geopolitics.

Figures recently released by the US State Department’s Visa Office showed about 900 F-1 visas were granted to Hong Kong students for academic and language training programmes between June and August last year, which is the period when the documents are typically issued.

The figure marked a 35 per cent drop from the 1,395 visas issued in the same period in 2024, and the second-lowest since 2018.

The lowest figure was recorded in 2020, the year the Covid-19 pandemic began, when only 394 F-1 visas were issued to Hong Kong students.

The calculation of the number of student visas is based on the sum of the number of such documents issued to Hong Kong and British National (Overseas) passport holders reported in the US Visa Office’s monthly figures.

For mainland students, the drop was even steeper.

The number of F-1 visas issued for that demographic between June and August 2025 stood at 25,625, a drop of 42 per cent from the preceding year’s 44,088.

In May 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a stricter approach to Chinese student visas, pledging to revoke existing ones and heighten scrutiny of future applications from the mainland and Hong Kong.

Jonathan Ma, a senior academic adviser and regional manager for Hong Kong at Crimson Education, a university consultancy that helps students apply to Ivy League and other top-tier institutions in the United States, said Chinese passport holders were among his clients who were worried about getting visas. “At that time, many students were waiting for their offers or deciding whether they should go after obtaining the offers,” he said. “The actual impact was quite limited, but the move created chaos and anxiety over visa applications,” he said. “Although the visa centre was closed for a while, all students eventually obtained their visas.

The main effect was psychologic

原文链接: 南华早报