House Republican Wants Visa Applicants To Declare Their Ties With Communist Party

On May 12, Republican congressman Jim Banks reportedly would soon introduce a bill that would require all non-immigrant visa applicants, including those outside Communist China, to declare whether they were a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or another totalitarian regime.

The bill was spurred by a recent report from Axios’ Lachlan Markay, whose analysis of government data revealed that Russian and the CCP’s state media have taken advantage of America’s H-1B program to orchestrate and boost foreign state media operations on the U.S. soil.

Regarding the importance of this bill, the report says the measure is an attempt to prevent foreign propagandists, including those from Russia and Communist China – from continuing to piggyback on a visa program that originally is aimed at luring high-skilled workers to the U.S.

Banks, who chairs the Republican Study Committee, the House’s largest group of conservatives, believed the CCP has used the American overly lax visa system to export its propaganda and malign influence. He was amazed to discover many of these CCP agents came to the U.S. legally and without disclosing their membership in the authoritarian regime.

Rep. Banks’s bill will help law enforcement track the CCP’s activity and prevent many of the regime’s abuses before they happen.