Daily Kos87%
Brain drain worsens as Trump plots to keep international students out 78%
By Lisa Needham97%
7/30/2026, 5:01:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 13 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Biased Writer Voice, and Appeal to Emotion, with Politically Left Leaning Bias as the most egregious example at 75.1% saturation with 458 hits. Analysis detected 1,505 faulty-reasoning hits from 610 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 69.3% and a BS Rank of 78% (4,919 of 22,405 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 78.00% of the article peer group.
President Donald Trump hates immigration, period.
Though ICE thugs run the administration playbook of terror against ostensibly undocumented immigrants, there’s really a whole-of-government approach going on now designed to make it nearly impossible to come here legally, unless you are a racist white Afrikaner.
And if people from other countries somehow do manage to come here legally, Trump and his minions are going to make it impossible for them to stay.
The Wall Street Journal has reporting on the latest shameful idea that the administration is tossing around, which is charging a $100,000 fee to international students who want to work here after graduating from a university.
Currently, we have a good and cool and functional program called Optional Practical Training where international students can stay and work for one to three years on their student visa.
At last count, about 419,000 people were doing this.
But this proposal would slap a fee on that program that is deliberately designed to make it impossible for nearly any international student to stay and work here after graduation.
Related | What to know about Trump’s $100K fee on H-1B visas and the court decision that struck it down
As the Journal points out, this is essentially trying to accomplish what Trump was blocked from doing with his $100,000 H-1B visa fee, which a federal court struck down last month.
That proposal would have functionally barred the door for most overseas tech workers, researchers, and other skilled workers despite those folks often being specifically recruited by stateside employers.
But every time a court tells this administration something is illegal, they just regroup and figure out a new vector to attack.
It’s honestly literally the only thing they are good at and can maintain continuous focus on.
This proposed $100,000 fee would also, of course, serve to deter international students from coming here to study in the first place if their plan was to stay in the country and pursue a career.
The idea that international students who stay here and work are engaging in some sort of scam and that it is a flaw in the immigration system is ridiculous.
We literally have laws that let them do this, but Trump doesn’t like it.
International students aren’t abusing or exploiting some process simply by having student visas or legally working here after graduation.
The administration has also just finalized a rule that arbitrarily limits how long international students may stay for their course of study.
This is designed to cut them off from being able to finish post-graduate programs like doctorates and residencies.
Closing the door to international students is dead stupid, as students from other countries are an economic boon, adding $40 billion a year to the U.S. economy.
They also tend to pay full freight for higher education, which functionally subsidizes scholarship aid for American students
Of course, Trump doesn’t really want most American students to see college as attainable.
He’s strangling the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
He’s capped student loans at a rate that will make it impossible for lots of people to get post-graduate degrees, especially in medicine and law, which is, again, the whole point.
He’s killed every effort at student loan reform or forgiveness, leading to neat things like a record 9.5 million people being in default as of March of this year.
Quite the achievement!
It isn’t clear who Trump thinks deserves to attend college.
His kids?
His friends’ kids?
Wannabe big tech CEOS?
But it isn’t you, and it isn’t anyone you know.
For the rest of us, he wants an uneducated wasteland.
Analysis
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