Authors explore the effect of recent tensions on international student flows to the United States that are critical to U.S. higher education, knowledge production, and the broader economy.

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Haines Hall Rm 279

Speaker: Steven Liao (Political Science, UC Riverside)

One of the most critical recent developments in the global economy is how U.S.-China tensions are reshaping cross-border economic integration. To date, however, our understanding of its impact has been mainly limited to international trade and finance, as opposed to migration. To fill this gap, we explore the effect of recent tensions on international student flows to the United States that are critical to U.S. higher education, knowledge production, and the broader economy. We first develop hypotheses on how geopolitics and security concerns shape international student flows. We then construct a unique granular dataset that combines the universe of international students in the United States from 2000–2021 with novel measures of the sensitivity of students’ study fields. Using a series of difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs, we find that tensions since 2018 reduced sensitive-field Ph.D. students from China by around 18 to 33% but have no discernible effects at the M.A. or B.A. level. The findings reveal new patterns of uneven international student decline in recent years and extend policy debates on technology security and export controls to cross-border human capital barriers.

Steven Liao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside, and a Non-resident Scholar at the 21st Century China Center, University of California, San Diego.

Paper joint with Margaret E. Roberts, Ruixue Jia, and Keng-Chi Chang.

Sponsor(s): Center for Study of International Migration