Fmr. Clinton Official Metzl: There Are Issues with Foreign Students Spying, ‘Chanting Incitement to Murder’
On Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN NewsNight,” Atlantic Council Senior Fellow, former World Health Organization Adviser, and former NSC official during the Clinton administration Jamie Metzl stated that the overwhelming majority of Chinese students are great and the U.S. has to maintain openness, “But do it in a way that recognizes that we can’t just have this open fairy tale globalization.” And there are “Chinese students who are watching other students and reporting back.” And “we have students from other countries who are chanting incitement to murder like the murders we saw in Washington last week.”
Metzl said, “Abby, we are in a Cold War. China is our adversary. They’re behaving like they’re our adversary. These Chinese students who are coming here are incredible, brilliant students, and we should welcome them. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t people in every American university who are Chinese students who are watching other students and reporting back. That doesn’t mean we have intellectual — we don’t have intellectual property theft. There are real problems. In our universities, we have students from other countries who are chanting incitement to murder like the murders we saw in Washington last week. I’m a Democrat. I’m a liberal. I absolutely think America’s openness is our greatest strength and we need these students here to come here and build their lives, build our economy. But I think it’s okay for us to ask questions. So, I think the devil will be in the details here. We need to be keeping an eye on the people who come into this country, but we need to maintain our openness.”
He added, “We need to be using a scalpel and not a sledgehammer. And for a lot of these efforts, I feel like it’s a sledgehammer, and that’s the danger, whether it’s the stuff at Harvard with the visas and everything else.”
Metzl added that the Trump administration isn’t using a scalpel approach.
He further stated, “[W]e are, in many ways, under attack by China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. And they’re using social media and other avenues. And they’re sending people here to try to take advantage of our openness. And the challenge for us is how do we celebrate our openness and maintain the things that made us great — because you go to Silicon Valley, so many of the entrepreneurs are amazing immigrants, refugees, and others — ? But do it in a way that recognizes that we can’t just have this open fairy tale globalization. We need to protect our interests.”
Metzl concluded that “the vast majority of these Chinese students are incredible, wonderful people.”
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