Florida barred from preventing 2 Chinese students from working

By Valerie Boey

(This story is done in partnership with the URL Collective)

Orlando, Florida- A judge has ruled in a preliminary injunction that two Florida International University students from China can continue working for the university. The Federal lawsuit challenges a Florida law, which bans the state’s 12 public universities from partnering or accepting grants from China, Russia, Iran, Korea, Venezuela and Syria. 

The ruling is temporary, pending a final ruling. The state has already filed an appeal.

The lawsuit Zhipeng Yin vs the Florida Department of Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, challenges a law prohibiting faculty or student exchange programs, recruiting programs, dual degree programs, research collaboration and similar programs, with people from those countries, unless the Florida Board of Governors approves the request. 

According to the lawsuit, two Chinese students allowed in the United States under F-1 student visas, had already received offers for a graduate teaching assistantship at Florida International University. It included stipends, tuition waivers, and health insurance. 

Attorney for the plaintiffs, Keliang “Clay” Zhu of the Chinese America Legal Defense Alliance explains how the law is affecting students and professors from the countries named in the suit. “Under this law, this kind of employment arrangement would become illegal. So it just makes it virtually impossible for the students to complete the course.”

The preliminary ruling applies not just to the two Chinese students, but for all students with an F1 visa from the six named countries, according to Yin’s attorneys.

The lawsuit also states that a University of Florida professor named Zhengfei Guan, who is a legal permanent resident of the United States, sought to hire students for a postdoctoral associate position. 

“Most of his applicants are from China,” said Guan. “There’s very little opportunity for him to get students within the United States or from any other country outside China, just because not many students are interested in this kind of measure. So several of his projects have been suspended, and he’s losing funding. So those impacts are real”.

 Guan says he advises farmers how to manage their businesses with a focus on labor and market issues. The concern for improved security at Florida’s universities occurred after a 2020 hearing of the Florida House Select Committee on the Integrity of Research Institutions. During the hearing, Rhonda Bishop, Vice President of Compliance and Risk at the University of Central Florida told the Committee that a UCF lab assistant was charged in Federal Court, of smuggling autonomous submarine parts to China. In 2016 she was sentenced to two years in prison for acting as a spy and conspiracy to commit international money laundering. She also had strong ties to the People’s Republic of China and their military, the People’s Liberation Army, which was never disclosed to UCF. Her boss, who was a longtime professor at UCF, fled back to China.

It was also disclosed during the hearing, that UCF fired a Chinese professor in 2017, after Bishop says he shipped probe needles to China, without the required license. The needles made computers work faster. Bishop says he kept traveling to China despite their requests for him to stop and that he was recruiting grad students from China to work in his lab. Bishop says, another faculty member resigned in 2017, after he was offered a 200-thousand-dollar donation from a Chinese entity, but he quit because the university wouldn’t allow faculty to receive the funding.

Attorney Zhu understands the concern for national security, but says, “You determine those threats on a case-by-case basis. You do not just issue a blanket, you know, prohibition against all students from those particular countries.” He blames politics for the legislation, saying at the time Governor DeSantis was running for President “The political environment has caused a lot of politicians to go to this kind of xenophobic route here, claiming everything associated with China is suspicious and a threat to the national security, I think that goes too far.” We tried speaking to Florida legislators about law but haven’t heard back. In 2023, Governor Ron Desantis talked about the threat of China during a press conference, “I think the CCP (Communist China Party) has done a really, really effective job at identifying some of the soft underbelly of American society and really focusing on academic infiltration and influence, and they’ve been able to expand their influence in academia tremendously, part of the reason because they’re throwing a lot of money around. And so in Florida, we say, Not here, not on our watch.” 

But Zhu says there’s already a system to keep the country safe. “The Federal government already has a process in place to do background checks during the visa interview application process. There’s already a process in place. There’s very little for the state government to play a role here”.  While  Governor Desantis says he doesn’t want the Communist China Party in the Sunshine State, Zhu warns the legislation is racist and that his clients are not part of the CCP. “This is blatant discrimination based on national origin and race, and if we go down this route that will really inflame Asian hate sentiment in this country.”

(Editor’s note: This article has been updated with new information from the plaintiff’s attorneys)