Half of them are spies, ever considered this?
You have to ask what their plans are, where their families are, do they plan to stay here, is their family moving here. Americans are just not suspicious enough.
I knew someone was going to mention the “spy” angle.
These kids are teenagers, and we’re talking the state of Maine here. What are they going to steal, our techniques for raking wild blueberries? How to use a chain saw while cutting down trees for firewood? How to put a rubber band on the claw of a lobster without getting nipped? Most of Maine’s “industries” are low-tech.
The schools are happy to get the $40,000 annual tuition fees to supplement their budgets. The local kids like interacting and making friends with young people their age from other countries, and the foreign kid’s parents want their offspring to succeed in the world, so they send them to America. The kid’s parents also like the fact that their children are going to school in a quiet, low-crime small town. Some of the parents were leery about enrolling their children in similar programs in big cities such as New York or Chicago. When the kid’s graduate, most of them plan to attend college in the U.S., Canada or Europe.
As I mentioned, they’re not just from China.....the kids are from many other countries around the world, including countries that are allied with the U.S.
The only time I ever got suspicious was during a trip to a T.J. Max store here in Maine this past August. There were three young Asian males in their 20’s shopping in the store. All three of them were clean cut with haircuts similar to a Marine’s. I thought they were off-duty U.S. Special Forces of some kind. At the checkout counter, the guy manning the cashier register struck up a conversation with them, and they said they were from China. They spoke perfect English. They said they were a part of some program at Jackson Lab (a large facility in Bar Harbor, Maine that breeds white mice for medical research). I thought they looked like PLA (People’s Liberation Army) types.