As the Trump administration finds itself in yet another legal battle over its constitutional authority, Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said the president needs to be “much more focused” when implementing his crackdown on foreign students.
On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security blocked Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students, in the latest salvo between the federal government and the esteemed institution. Dershowitz began his discussion on NewsNation’s “Cuomo” by putting the recent murder of Israeli embassy staff members Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26 on elite universities. “These two kids that were killed in Washington D.C. — Harvard and other universities have blood on their hands,” he said.
“Let’s be frank here, there are too many foreign students in American universities. At Harvard 27.5% of the student body is foreign, when I started teaching there it was probably 5%. So every spot that is taken by a foreign student is denying an American student.”
Dershowitz then advised the administration to not be so broad with their sanctioning of foreign students to avoid conflating the messaging. “President Trump is absolutely correct. If these were foreign students coming in from Nazi Germany in 1935 … liberals would have loved if the president had said ‘No, no, no, we don’t want people coming in from Germany.’ Look, this goes too far. It also covers Israeli students and Canadian students and British students. So, what we need is much more focused and targeted sanctions, focused and targeted on which research projects.”
“They shouldn’t be cutting back on research projects involving Alzheimer’s and cancer. But they should be cutting back on research that is propagandistic like at the Divinity School and the Public Health school. So, more targeting of which foreign students come in and which don’t,” he added.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order against the HHS over its pausing of Harvard’s access to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program following a lawsuit by the university. Dershowitz said the law is on the side of the Trump administration.
“By the way, Harvard is going to lose these cases. In the end, the executive has the right, and certainly the legislature has the right to determine who comes in and who doesn’t come into the country. It’s not up to the courts. They are the least qualified branch to determine who comes into the country, ” he added.
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