There's a big difference between cutting off all foreign-born talent—and addressing the serious issue of graduate school turning into an immigration racket; the current issue with graduate degrees is a very close mirror to the issue with H1b worker visas. The abuse of both systems has harmed Americans—and to some extent the long-term health of the tech industry and the academy.
American is built on immigration, and nearly all of us are immigrants or very recent descendants of immigrants. How in the world has immigration harmed Americans?
It's a NIMBY policy, pulling up the ladder. It's rooted in zero-sum thinking, that can't imagine "make the pie bigger" and can only imagine a fixed-size pie where their slice is getting smaller.
Given the impact the economy has on people's lives, it's an understandable fear. There's plenty of evidence for this not being the case (and in fact evidence for the "brain drain" strategy having substantial positive impact), but getting people to let go of a fear typically requires more than just hard evidence that it's unfounded.
(There's a separate branch of that fear, that imagines immigrants to be a drain on public assistance programs, but there's plenty of evidence that that is not the case.)
(Also, as always, policy is complicated and no comment that fits on a page is going to capture all the nuance of it or facets of it.)
I think if you're going to argue that we shouldn't have contemporary immigration because of the harm to native Americans, then you should show what harm is caused _now_, that native Americans actually oppose immigration, and probably that you support other ways of helping them like giving them land back.
Who cares if it's an easy path if the person graduates with the degree. It should be easy to immigrate here if you get an advanced degree. If you get a degree not in demand then you should be just as unhireable
A degree from Bullshit University in bullshitting should not grant any extra immigration rights because it doesn't mean anything. Although... the current administration must have high demand for bullshitters.
The people who can afford to live here spend all their time working, and no time participating in the community, much less enjoying and appreciating the things that make the area special.
I mean, yes, the benefits (and sometimes harms) of those companies to humanity reach multiple orders of magnitude more people than the microcosm of the Bay Area housing crisis.
This is a non-sequitur. Making immigration impossible or stopping science funding or whatever is not going to change the behavior of a market profiting off of housing.
As I understand, 1930s (and 1920s) Germany was not a desirable place due to the losses from WW1.
I meant more of a place where things are mostly going OK (compared to most other places), and resources (human and natural) are available, so any failure modes have to come from within.
Germany flipped over the boardgame while losing, but USA flipped it over while winning.
I think for any proposal to change policy that has serious impacts on the economics of the country, we should really be very clear on what problem we see, how we plan to solve it, and what specific trade-offs we're making with our solutions.
Even calling it “illegal immigration” lends fuel to the fire. There’s a very distinct difference between crossing the border illegally and violating the terms of a legally acquired visa or stamp. The latter is a civil matter which is why people weren’t historically rounded up and detained under threat of violence or murder. So yeah this whole thing is strictly about xenophobia being used to whip up the in group about an out group so we don’t look too closely at EG Venezuela or the sales process for presidential pardons.
