“No policy should target individuals solely on the basis of their national origin,” Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA, an association of international educators, said in a statement. “Making international students - the most vetted and tracked non-immigrants in the United States - a scapegoat for xenophobic and anti-Chinese sentiment is misguided and antithetical to our national interest,” Aw said. Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said China “expresses strong concern and firmly opposes such practices”. He said education exchange and cooperation have long served as a pillar for the stable development of China-US relations. The Asian American Scholars Forum said such legislation would harm the talent pipeline of Asian American scientists, scholars and researchers, undermining US leadership in science and innovation. Despite the Bill’s slim chance of getting approved, Yangyang Cheng, a research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said the Bill “should be seen as part of a broader effort to restrict academic freedom and hurt higher education in this country, to control what can be taught, which research projects can be pursued, and who have access to the classrooms and laboratories". In the 2023 to 2024 school year, more than 277,000 Chinese students were studying in US universities, or a quarter of the total number of international students, according to an annual report on international students from the Institute of International Education. The number of Chinese students in the US, however, has been declining for years. Last year, China lost its status to India as the top feeder country of international students. In 2023, Florida passed a law prohibiting state universities from hiring students from China and six other countries for graduate assistant and postdoc positions, and it has been challenged in court. Several US universities have ended academic partnerships with Chinese schools amid mounting pressure from Republican lawmakers over national security concerns. Reactions on China’s social media to the new proposed legislation were varied. Some who said they had recently received offers from American schools expressed concerns, some dismissed it as “a political show”, and some called it “another Chinese Exclusion Act”.