Maybe they're less likely to get searched/caught, but when they are it seems to be enforced. I can't find any stats supporting either position though.
PhD students do a lot a the grunt work that more famous people get most of the credit for.
And can willingly, or under coercion by their home government (We'll put your parents in prison, rape your mother, have you stabbed in the street), hand over every last bit of data they have access to on any project(s). Considering most decent educational institutions receive mountains of defense department money and have all sorts of government-involved research projects for all sorts of emerging technologies that have anything remotely approaching intelligence community or military applications... I can see why we'd want to crack down, purely for opsec reasons, on students coming from a country that is most likely going to overtly be our enemy sometime in the near to mid-term future.
Frankly, I don't think we should educate anyone that goes back to a hostile country. China is rising, and that can cause a lot of problems for us, see China Sea for one. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/china-army-colonel-says-beij...
Create a hostile environment for Chinese students so that they are encouraged to return home.
Then prevent them from coming at all because they may return home.
This completely ignored that the massive majority of Chinese stay in the US, and even more would stay in the US contributing disproportionately more than nearly every other grouping of people.
If it wasn't for the US driving them away, it's hard to see why any Chinese national, especially a well educated one, would ever choose to leave the US for China.
This would be an utterly disasterous policy. The only reason to enact it is if your own side is actively seeking war.
And may I note that irrespective of the overall behaviour of the two regimes, in the case of complaining about China causing problems for US interests in the China sea, the China sea is a lot nearer to China than it is to the US.
Trade routes over for one. Freedom of navigation is another reason. What they might go after next time is another concern. Like it or not, USA has interests and allies over there.
Doesn't this get checked when you leave, at passport control?
I would think at the very least it would raise a huge red flag the next time you try to enter US...
I also doubt that any serious employer would hire someone without checking his/her paperwork, outside maybe of seasonal/server jobs.
Are these people not from Immigration/Border control?
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification
>Doesn't this get checked when you leave, at passport control?
Imagine that there is this huge underground market dedicated to solving this problem for you attached mysteriously to the entire US bar industry.
edit - this is honestly the only thing that makes sense. I haven't ever done so, but brits working their US holidays and massively over staying visas by years is not uncommon and I can only think of one example of someone who ended up in actual shit.