
I’m the President of MIT America Needs Foreign Students - justin66
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/coronavirus-trump-immigration-students.html
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eanzenberg
Universities need foreign students to pay full price.

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stunt
Surely they can find a way to fund it without international students if they
have it.

I think it's about all the other added values. So much comes out of these
universities. All the researches, studies, entrepreneurs, inventors. That's
the main goal.

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stunt
Reminds me Dr. Michio Kaku talk about H1B visa as America's secret weapon
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK0Y9j_CGgM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK0Y9j_CGgM)

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nayuki
The title of the HN post is confusing: "I’m the President of MIT America Needs
Foreign Students".

Adding a period after MIT would be a lot better: "I’m the President of MIT.
America Needs Foreign Students".

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stunt
At least some people could related a few issues when Trump was only targeting
illegal immigrants. But, what is the deal with students and high-skill
workers?

To me the logic is like this: "I have eight years max. And I know that I can't
fix the unemployment problem. So let's go and blame other things and promise
this problem will disappear when we solve those other things. If I repeat it,
everyone will believe it"

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otoburb
Survivorship bias notwithstanding, nothing hits home harder than Dr. Reif's
personal anecdote:

 _" This country derives many intangible advantages from being a beacon of
hope for people around the world; I first came to America in 1974 from
Venezuela, where my parents finally settled as refugees from Hitler’s Europe.
I came to improve my own prospects through a graduate degree. But I found a
culture of openness, boldness, ingenuity and meritocracy — a culture which
taught me that in coming to America, I had truly come home."_

~~~
pjc50
Statistically I wonder how many future Dr. Reifs are stuck in ICE detention.
Or, for that matter, the vast refugee camps from Syria that are scattered over
Europe and Turkey.

~~~
otoburb
Mark Twain thought along the same lines: _" Thousands of geniuses live and die
undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War,
Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor
have risen into notice."_ \--Mark Twain

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PaulHoule
Yes, but...

If you look at a place like Silicon Valley, high housing costs, dysfunctional
taxes, and poor public services make it uncompetitive to raise children.

You can start them out in some village outside Bangalore, give them more
advanced schooling in the city, then send them to the core for college or
graduate school, then you have a capital-efficient worker.

I walked around in New York City with an Indian coworker who was waiting for
an H-1B and told him about how my ancestors fled economic collapse in Quebec
and impending war in Poland, how my mother-in-law was a hillbilly who married
an Italian fleeing the economic collapse that came after the war... and how we
were in a city in which linguists go to discover endangered languages, a
country that was so able to benefit from immigration -- but I could tell he
felt hurt that the U.S. didn't want him and I had no idea how to comfort him.

Talk to an African American man and you might find they don't like immigrants
coming from Mexico (who would work in the chicken factories in the South if
they didn't hire hundreds of illegals?) Many of them worked in jobs in the
1950s that are now mainly staffed by women. Many of them were just getting
settled in to factory and call center jobs when those went overseas.

A person like that might identify their own struggles and oppressions with
those of others and become more humanized (e.g. imagine Jewish people who
traveled to the American South to put their bodies in front of black bodies)
or they might feel that have a special burden and see themselves in
competition with other ethnic groups (e.g. Korean grocers in the ghetto.)

So for one thing there is resentment of immigration in the U.S. which is based
on class interests. If Trump makes explicit racism uncool for a generation but
pedal-to-the-metal globalism reigns, you may see black people get together
with "white people who have black problems" and form one of the two political
poles maybe 20-30 years from now.

Another problem with the "import workers" concept is that it produces a person
who is out of touch with their environment. A person who travels the world all
over their career and spends their time in air conditioned building cannot
understand the reality of global warming.

Farmers in any part of the world are intimately involved with the weather and
they are adapting to global warming now, not thinking about what they will do
in 20-30 years.

If I went to some place like India and tried to sell something I know I would
have to learn about the culture, not in an abstract or comfortable sense, but
probably in the school of hard knocks.

When companies try to develop products for the U.S. in an environment such as
NYC or SV and the leadership and workforce are heavy in young immigrants they
might make mistakes that they might not have been made if they were more
representative of the target market and also had an age-mixed workforce
bringing experience and a broader viewpoint.

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ta1972
Why not take in African American students and thus improve their
economic/social standing?

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linuxftw
I don't understand this nationalistic view that "America" needs to have the
best innovators from everyone corralled into it.

Does the wealthiest country on the planet need the most talented people on the
planet to succeed? No, it does not. Developing countries need those people. As
long as America is the brain drain for everyone else, it's easier to exercise
economic imperialism.

Too much immigration is tied to corporate welfare. Immigration should be based
on human rights rather than importing white collar labor.

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JoeAltmaier
Hm. Not sure what a medical researcher is going to do, plunked down in a
country without resources or labs or anything, really, they need to be
effective.

Its an efficiency argument, that concentrating resources yields more results.
Ideally, for everyone. That's not working out so great, but the solution is
probably to work on that, and not cripple innovation for spite.

~~~
linuxftw
> Not sure what a medical researcher is going to do, plunked down in a country
> without resources or labs or anything, really, they need to be effective.

It's not clear that this person needs to be a medical researcher. Maybe they
need to be an electrical engineer or civil engineer to help build this
infrastructure to allow medical researchers to exist. Of course, there's no
domestic market for those positions, civil authorities just hire engineering
firms from developed countries.

It's also not clear if America needs a supply of this labor from elsewhere.
Even if "America" did, if "America" was short on this supply, then wages would
rise for the existing labor pool, this would stimulate growth in the other
countries for this sector because the market is signaling there is money to be
made.

Of course, it's better for American corporations if they can control as much
of the talent capital as possible.

Taking in foreign students also distorts the education market place in
developing countries. Everyone has heard of MIT, but what is the best
engineering university in Kenya? The education industry as a result is
underdeveloped in developing countries as well.

We can go into another can of worms about how many students and graduate
students are essentially free labor for these institutions, and the 'students'
are paying for the privilege. What they really look like to me are unpaid
internships under the guise of 'education' in which major universities have a
monopoly.

