> They contribute a huge amount to the IP developed within a country.

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.

But seriously, why would a Chinese student, born, raised and educated in China, be loyal to USA because he studied here for x years? USA and China are heading to a collision of sorts, China would not trust thousands of US born students and researchers in high positions.

This is the kind of approach to things that I tend to associate with the global non-denominational death cult.