9 ms·

Amid debate, all 2016 American Nobel laureates are immigrants

59 points by _nh_ 10y ago

pvdebbe 10y ago
And again they give a false implication that legal immigration would be at stake here. I don't mind if people support Trump or Hillary or whoever, but this intellectual dishonesty about newsreporting should cease.
- croon 10y ago
  To be fair, the counterpoint would be the false implication that only illegal immigrants would be affected by a Trump presidency, which is equally dishonest.
  - tylerwhipple 10y ago
    Honest question, besides "Trump is a racist" are there any concrete reasons legal immigrants would be affected?
    - croon 10y ago
      Well, first off, legality in immigration is a cloudy term, meaning it's often tried in immigration courts, of which there are 58 in the entire country [1]. Also notable is that you are not appointed a lawyer in these courts [2]. There are only 250 judges in the country, handling more than 3 times the cases regular judges do [3]. Here's one example of an American being deported: [4]. This is the case right now. Ramping up deportation as Trump has suggested would obviously not yield better results. The immigration courts right now have a backlog of more than half a million cases [5]. I've not even touched stop-and-frisk, religious profiling, etc. Now, and this part is speculation, this part of history comes to mind: [6]. If it's TLDR, then search for "repatriation". [1]: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/office-of-the-chief-immigration-judge https://www.justice.gov/eoir/office-of-the-chief-immigration... [2]: http://naij-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016-01-14-Reuters-Why-are-these-children-representing-themselves-in-court.pdf http://naij-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016-01-14-Re... [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-a-crowded-immigration-court-seven-minutes-to-decide-a-familys-future/2014/02/02/518c3e3e-8798-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-a-crowded-immigra... [4]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/the-deportation-machine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/the-deportation... [5]: http://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.160915.html http://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.160915.html [6]: http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-history-of-mexican-american-repatriation http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-h... Edit: Bonus: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trumps-proposal-for-legal-immigration/499061/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trumps-p...
      - code_sardaukar 10y ago
        I wonder why it is that your legalese is only applied to people who say that illegal immigration is a bad thing. Lots of people openly say that we should tolerate illegal immigration either for economic or humanitarian reasons, and I've never seen such an argument applied to them.
    - bcg1 10y ago
      var iceberg = { tip : "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on" } https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-...
      - eveningcoffee 10y ago
        Edit: It could be that I overreacted. I would recommend to read the full quote after the link and not conclude based on small out of context quote. If you want a historical analogy that helps you to better connect with the situation under question then I would recommend to think about immigration of Germans into South America after WWII. This is what at least comes into my mind. I do not know if this analogy would be fair to either parties. Also it does not follow that I would recommend you to support one of the candidates based on this. If you happen to be an American.
        bcg1 10y ago
        I linked to the entire press release.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  The definition of what legal is and its process is in the hands of who we vote for.
- RGamma 10y ago
  Exactly, and also once you're an established researcher or professional immigrating to basically any country becomes a breeze. Stoddart's open borders part therefore applies to many countries when you're talking about "brains", not poor/unqualified folk, who are still filtered rather rigorously (or at least disincentivized) by a legal immigration procedure.
- youdontknowtho 10y ago
  intellectual dishonesty. if you think that trump has been talking about illegal immigration only, I would like to point you to the term "dog whistle politics". Do you think that the white supremacists that have come out in support of him are only referring to illegal immigrants when they talk about the threat posed to "our" culture? Lee Atwater once explained in a speech that because of changes in social moirés you couldn't call black people "n*" anymore. Instead you could refer to racial issues in terms of tax cuts and school busing. Tax cuts keep your hard earned money from benefiting "those"" people and school busing...they were going to make your kids schools worse by bringing "them" in. Are there issues with the US immigration system. Yes. Has that been at issue in this election? Not really. That's just not what's going on here. The issue of immigration is a surrogate for a perceived loss of power by one population relative to another.
  - kristopolous 10y ago
    there's more to it. The disenfranchised poor white didn't have a political voice. I know many out-of-work ex-democrat ex-liberal 50+ white males that are supporters of trump. Just last weekend, I was talking to an avid environmentalist in an interracial marriage who supports trump. To say "well some ignorant people are just racist" misses the true thing that's going on.
    - croon 10y ago
      No, it's every kind of populist blame politics. What's unfortunate is that Trumps platform is based purely on emotion, and zero solutions.
      - kristopolous 10y ago
        If you'd like to know more about how it's different, Robert Reich talked about it recently at the Commonwealth Club https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2016-09-27/robert-reich-oddest-presidential-election-living-memory https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2016-09-27/robert-re... and UC Berkeley Sociologist Arlie Hochshchild spent 5 years researching it (https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning-ebook/dp/B01EEQ9BSW/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning-ebo...), here's a Mother Jones article about it http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar-supporters http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue....
mms1973 10y ago
They are not immigrants, they are expatriates.
- croon 10y ago
  When did they transition? "An expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing, as an immigrant, in a country other than that of their citizenship."
  - tnzn 10y ago
    Well, in his opinion it was not a specific point in time, rather a period during which their ancestry became white because of lack of D Vitamin
  - miraj 10y ago
    its a wordplay + bias by mainstream media. expats = migrants from the 'elite' class. educated, wealthy, well-connected etc. most often referred to persons from so called '1st/2nd world' countries. immigrants = migrants from the 'cattle' class. not-so-rich, varied education, mostly non-caucasians. most often referred to persons from so called '3rd world' countries.
- tnzn 10y ago
  They are, by definition, immigrants.
- asmithmd1 10y ago
  What is an expatriate, someone who comes from a country you would visit on vacation? According to the article, at least one of the laureates is now a US citizen.
- gpderetta 10y ago
  I found this '/s' on the floor, I think it must be your.
tnzn 10y ago
Do we really need Nobel Prizes to legitimize migration ? I mean, why can't someone just be allowed to move because life is too harsh in his home country or because he has an opportunity or a family in the other one ? Because seriously, all those antionalists have done to "earn" their nationality is grow in the belly of the right mom'
- flyinglizard 10y ago
  The argument being countered by showing the origin of the 2016 laureates is that immigration is bad for the destination country; on the contrary, immigrants have fantastic achievements, both as scientists and as entrepreneurs. This is not about the wellbeing of the immigrants themselves. Arguably, tough (yet reasonable) immigration policies act as somewhat of a barrier, causing "good" immigrants to flow in, and restricting the bad. I mean, you can't argue that on average, the population of prospective immigrants is any better than the indigenous American citizens, but those who make it past the immigration hoops are, evidently, pretty good. If all immigration barriers were to be removed tomorrow, the influx of third world population would crush the USA - or any other western state - as we know it. The challenge of the immigration system is being tough but fair, where you let more of the useful immigrants pass while filtering out the rest. The American system is not there; it's tough alright, but it's still missing on a huge amount of human potential. (I'm not a US citizen)
punazj 10y ago
Hate to play devil's advocate. But there just might be a reason or two to explain Trump's supporter base without using phrases like "white supremacist" and "racist xenophobe"... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440334/immigration-national-academies-sciences-report-fiscal-economic-impact-native-born http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440334/immigration-nat... Bottom section is the critical point, about native born workers having 500 bn in wealth transferred from the labor class to the ownership class as a result of immigration. We live in a very comfortable echo chamber where we usually don't actually compete with illegal immigrants for jobs. Not everyone is so lucky. And those people deserve to be heard instead of being shouted down and drowned out with negative "-ist" arguments designed to censor them.
- croon 10y ago
  Sure. I actually agree with what you write... up to the conclusion. Why does this reasoning end up blaming people that by circumstance was born elsewhere for competing by doing a better/cheaper job, instead of blaming the system for allowing that transfer of resources between classes? Why not use $100bn of those 500 for betterment/education/job creation/etc for those less "lucky"?
  - punazj 10y ago
    Because of capitalism I think, you can't just appropriate someone's profits, that's not capitalism. There are two basic ideas to solve this though, you can put more and more taxes on the capital owning class to "make them pay their fair share" for, from what I gather the humanists want, an unlimited number of economic migrants because it's the human thing to do. Now an important thing to note, might be Trump's comments in the second debate, that while everyone is going on about how he legally avoided paying maximal amounts of taxes (which I would do as well, I think most everyone pays as little tax as they legally can), Hillary's donors also use those loopholes. It takes a lot more research into the respective tax plans to see if "making the rich pay their fair share" is a campaign line or an actual plan, so that takes checking. I gather that the arguments against this are that if people can't be rich in the USA, they will go be rich somewhere else. The USA, from Trump's rhetoric, I haven't checked this, has some of the higher corporate tax rates in the world, and seeing as how manufacturing has already spread outside the USA, is it really crazy to assume the capital will as well (especially when selling the goods to America is facilitated by free trade deals that are in place, making it less costly to move your business to another country). This is the Democratic party tack to deal with wealth inequality. The second plan is to cause a shortage of labor, which would increase it's value, which would make wages go up. The common ways to do this would be: to make it expensive to import goods into America (which lessens the effect of labor in foreign factories which export into the USA) by getting rid of free trade agreements; and to lower the number of people in the USA competing for that labor. We attempt to do this by having an immigration procedure, with quotas, so that we can accept as immigrants into our labor force the number of people needed at various skill levels (this would be why it's easier for a doctor to get in than a farmer, say). Trump's "wall" is basically just a way to say "we should enforce the quotas that our immigration experts are setting so that our labor force isn't glutted by excess supply in any relative tier". This is the republican tack to tackle wealth disparity. The arguments against this are mostly humanitarian, from what I gather. A significant portion of the population consider's it America's duty and legacy to be the harbor for the indigent. There's also arguments for cultural enrichment etc. I think that's why so much emotion is involved in opposing it, and why so much backlash is rightfully indignant and angry. One side is hurt by this betrayal of the American identity by building a wall to oppress the poor and keep them from the upward path -- and then begins to call the other side hateful things... When the other side tried to start an economic conversation. This is just my interpretation of the situation.
klagermkii 10y ago
So where are the American-born Nobel laureates? Surely all six being immigrants it at least a little statistically strange. Is this a result of poor US primary education, an issue with culture, or something else at play?
- rak00n 10y ago
  It's statistics I believe. 6 billion vs 318 million. Beside that the people who get the chance to move to USA are cream of that 6 billion.
conjectures 10y ago
While on this side of the pond, amidst the Brexit debate, I note the UK born Nobel laureates appear to be emigrants. Maybe the US cup is half full?
dschiptsov 10y ago
That's the point of the US immigration system - to attract top 5% of the bell curve.
- croon 10y ago
  Yeah, I loved my NYC visit a couple of years ago. The statue of liberty was incredible, and reading that famous quote really inspiring: "Give me your healthy, your rich, your educated masses yearning to contribute significantly to our GDP."
NhanH 10y ago
I was curious so I went to check for historical Nobel prizes. Wikipedia helpfully has the list of all laureates by country along with their birth origin (0). 98 out of 362 American Nobel laureates are born outside of the US (Bengt R. Holmström was listed under Finland for some reasons, otherwise it would be 99/363). Also, first American Nobel laureate was Teddy Roosevelt. Now that is a surprise. (0): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...
iopq 10y ago
And none of them are illegal immigrants from Mexico
- GnwbZHiU 10y ago
  and none of them are Muslim immigrants.
  - techer 10y ago
    And none of them American born Christians. What's your point? Last year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aziz_Sancar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aziz_Sancar
code_sardaukar 10y ago
In the non-Bayesian updating of progressives, if 100% of Nobel laureates are immigrants, this is evidence that diversity is good, but if 100% of Nobel laureates are born in the US, this is evidence of discrimination.
hugh4life 10y ago
And every one of them would have been welcome to immigrate before the 1965 immigration law. That wouldn't be true many past winners but it's still important to point out that nobel prize winners aren't exactly evenly distributed among the source populations of immigrants. I find it laughable that all immigrants are bundled under the banner of "immigrant". Apparently the category of "race" or even "ethnicity" should not be used but the category of "immigrant" despite origin is something that is of great value despite being far more general.
- whack 10y ago
  Are you suggesting that the immigration system should specifically make it easier for Europeans to immigrate, but not Mexicans/Middle-Easterners? Please sketch out some specific policy prescriptions.
  - hugh4life 10y ago
    Immigration should be mostly skills based and there is no reason to use race or ethnicity for determining who immigrates. What I am suggesting is that this collective romanticism about immigrants is absurd. This was posted it the "latino" section of thehill to make an ideological point yet none of these people are of latin american origin.
hclivess 10y ago
sure they're all illegal immigrants.
mc32 10y ago
There is a difference between legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, immigrants with advanced education and immigrants with low levels of education. To evaluate the contribution of all of them together and say that the are the same is like taking a look at all Americans and saying, Americans are doing great, look at our per capita income. There is a debate to be had about who and how and how many people from where we allow to settle. We are outliers in how many people we take in. And I think we should tailor policies with the impact on Americans in mind. We're no longer in a steep growth phase, we're a mature economy which can successfully absorb so many new people into viable jobs. We need to work harder to get our underemployed better employed before we employ the surplus workers from elsewhere. That's not to say no immigration. Just controlled and proportional to need and population of origin so that both a Senegalese and Indian and Cuban have reasonable equality in obtaining a visa. There is no reason we can't set data driven quotas to allow, say, 2MM per annum to fill needs for ditch diggers and doctors, etc. But base it on need and do it with some balance.
- golemotron 10y ago
  The Overton Window on immigration is fascinating. We've gone from being a nation that that had selective immigration all through its history to one where trying to halt illegal immigration gets you labeled a xenophobe and a racist. Social media has made it worse. I think that it encourages preference falsification and causes inelasticity in the Overton Window. That inelasticity means that changes in public opinion are abrupt and usually need some concrete excuse to be justified.
  - ardit33 10y ago
    That is not true, not for the first 100+ years at least. Until 1882, if you could afford the ticket to the US, you could come. So, at the time relatively expensive travel costs were the barrier of immigration, but not laws. "The Page Act becomes law. It's the country's first exclusionary act, banning criminals, prostitutes, and Chinese contract laborers from entering the country. 1882. Congress passes the Immigration Act."
- TorKlingberg 10y ago
pornel 10y ago
Brexiters want currently legal EU immigrants to leave. It does affect science, because scientists and students who are currently working/studying legally in the UK may lose their rights. Comments stressing immigration laws are only about illegal immigration are almost tautologic. Of course illegal immigrants are illegal, but the real issue is who the policy makers want to declare illegal.
deviate_X 10y ago
I'm interested in the arguments against immigrants who have nearly nothing and little-formalised skills. Historically is there any information on the quantities of migrants who have migrated to the USA with highly-formalised skills, or who are already wealthy vs. those who arrived with nearly empty pockets.
internaut 10y ago
Oh you shouldn't have opened this can of worms. Now that you have done so, I have a simple retort. The only person of African descent to win a real* Nobel Prize was Sir William Arthur Lewis for Economics, and that chap was obviously fairly well anglicized. Just look at his bio! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Arthur_Lewis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Arthur_Lewis * If we're working with the colloquial meaning of the phrase Nobel Prize, then winning it for 'Peace', while honorable and relevant to Alfred's original intent, isn't an intellectual feat. Intellectual prowess has nothing to do with morality, noble though it could be. Now onto Muslims. From Wikipedia: Muslims make up over 23% of the world's population.[5][6][7] And as of 2015, twelve Nobel Prize winners have been Muslims. Again, if you discount 'Peace' then only 3 Muslims have obtained a Nobel Prize for an intellectual reason. If one categorizes writing as of equal intellectual consequence as physics or chemistry, you only get an additional 2 winners. The long and short of it is that African and Middle Easterners are populations which are in the billions but which have a single digit number of Nobel Prize winners. That makes perfect sense even if you don't believe race is a real biological concept since those are the areas of our planet that have experienced the least amount of progress, dare I say civilization. If you dispute the Nobel Prize as evidence of an objective way to measure intellectual prowess I'll completely agree with you (even though I believe more objective metrics are likely to yield similar results), there are many intelligent people who have performed feats who don't get a Nobel Prize, but then maybe it points to the idea you shouldn't write headlines like "Amid debate, all 2016 American Nobel laureates are immigrants" because that is total bullshit.
- toomanybeersies 10y ago
  Wouldn't it seem purely logical that poorer countries would have less Nobel Prize winners? I suspect that there are not huge amounts of theoretical physicists in Afghanistan. Trying to equate it to how "civilised" a nation is, is just racism.
  - internaut 10y ago
    > Trying to equate it to how "civilised" a nation is, is just racism. Is that all you have got? Your ideals are intellectually dysfunctional, leading to stagnation, anarchy and death as they have done so in every age. The whitewash job on history is peeling off and every day that passes undermines your credibility. Watch, as Venezuela and South Africa collapse into an abyss. Watch, as each generation sinks deeper into poverty than the one before it. Working harder, for less, every day. Watch, as the fires rise in France and it becomes unsafe to walk the streets in our own cities. That is your work devil.

59 points by _nh_ 10y ago

And again they give a false implication that legal immigration would be at stake here. I don't mind if people support Trump or Hillary or whoever, but this intellectual dishonesty about newsreporting should cease.

croon 10y ago
To be fair, the counterpoint would be the false implication that only illegal immigrants would be affected by a Trump presidency, which is equally dishonest.
- tylerwhipple 10y ago
  Honest question, besides "Trump is a racist" are there any concrete reasons legal immigrants would be affected?
  - croon 10y ago
    Well, first off, legality in immigration is a cloudy term, meaning it's often tried in immigration courts, of which there are 58 in the entire country [1]. Also notable is that you are not appointed a lawyer in these courts [2]. There are only 250 judges in the country, handling more than 3 times the cases regular judges do [3]. Here's one example of an American being deported: [4]. This is the case right now. Ramping up deportation as Trump has suggested would obviously not yield better results. The immigration courts right now have a backlog of more than half a million cases [5]. I've not even touched stop-and-frisk, religious profiling, etc. Now, and this part is speculation, this part of history comes to mind: [6]. If it's TLDR, then search for "repatriation". [1]: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/office-of-the-chief-immigration-judge https://www.justice.gov/eoir/office-of-the-chief-immigration... [2]: http://naij-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016-01-14-Reuters-Why-are-these-children-representing-themselves-in-court.pdf http://naij-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016-01-14-Re... [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-a-crowded-immigration-court-seven-minutes-to-decide-a-familys-future/2014/02/02/518c3e3e-8798-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-a-crowded-immigra... [4]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/the-deportation-machine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/the-deportation... [5]: http://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.160915.html http://trac.syr.edu/whatsnew/email.160915.html [6]: http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-history-of-mexican-american-repatriation http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-h... Edit: Bonus: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trumps-proposal-for-legal-immigration/499061/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trumps-p...
    - code_sardaukar 10y ago
      I wonder why it is that your legalese is only applied to people who say that illegal immigration is a bad thing. Lots of people openly say that we should tolerate illegal immigration either for economic or humanitarian reasons, and I've never seen such an argument applied to them.
  - bcg1 10y ago
    var iceberg = { tip : "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on" } https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-...
    - eveningcoffee 10y ago
      Edit: It could be that I overreacted. I would recommend to read the full quote after the link and not conclude based on small out of context quote. If you want a historical analogy that helps you to better connect with the situation under question then I would recommend to think about immigration of Germans into South America after WWII. This is what at least comes into my mind. I do not know if this analogy would be fair to either parties. Also it does not follow that I would recommend you to support one of the candidates based on this. If you happen to be an American.
      - bcg1 10y ago
        I linked to the entire press release.
kristopolous 10y ago
The definition of what legal is and its process is in the hands of who we vote for.
RGamma 10y ago
Exactly, and also once you're an established researcher or professional immigrating to basically any country becomes a breeze. Stoddart's open borders part therefore applies to many countries when you're talking about "brains", not poor/unqualified folk, who are still filtered rather rigorously (or at least disincentivized) by a legal immigration procedure.
youdontknowtho 10y ago
intellectual dishonesty. if you think that trump has been talking about illegal immigration only, I would like to point you to the term "dog whistle politics". Do you think that the white supremacists that have come out in support of him are only referring to illegal immigrants when they talk about the threat posed to "our" culture? Lee Atwater once explained in a speech that because of changes in social moirés you couldn't call black people "n*" anymore. Instead you could refer to racial issues in terms of tax cuts and school busing. Tax cuts keep your hard earned money from benefiting "those"" people and school busing...they were going to make your kids schools worse by bringing "them" in. Are there issues with the US immigration system. Yes. Has that been at issue in this election? Not really. That's just not what's going on here. The issue of immigration is a surrogate for a perceived loss of power by one population relative to another.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  there's more to it. The disenfranchised poor white didn't have a political voice. I know many out-of-work ex-democrat ex-liberal 50+ white males that are supporters of trump. Just last weekend, I was talking to an avid environmentalist in an interracial marriage who supports trump. To say "well some ignorant people are just racist" misses the true thing that's going on.
  - croon 10y ago
    No, it's every kind of populist blame politics. What's unfortunate is that Trumps platform is based purely on emotion, and zero solutions.
    - kristopolous 10y ago
      If you'd like to know more about how it's different, Robert Reich talked about it recently at the Commonwealth Club https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2016-09-27/robert-reich-oddest-presidential-election-living-memory https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2016-09-27/robert-re... and UC Berkeley Sociologist Arlie Hochshchild spent 5 years researching it (https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning-ebook/dp/B01EEQ9BSW/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning-ebo...), here's a Mother Jones article about it http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar-supporters http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue....

mms1973 10y ago

They are not immigrants, they are expatriates.

croon 10y ago
When did they transition? "An expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing, as an immigrant, in a country other than that of their citizenship."
- tnzn 10y ago
  Well, in his opinion it was not a specific point in time, rather a period during which their ancestry became white because of lack of D Vitamin
- miraj 10y ago
  its a wordplay + bias by mainstream media. expats = migrants from the 'elite' class. educated, wealthy, well-connected etc. most often referred to persons from so called '1st/2nd world' countries. immigrants = migrants from the 'cattle' class. not-so-rich, varied education, mostly non-caucasians. most often referred to persons from so called '3rd world' countries.
tnzn 10y ago
They are, by definition, immigrants.
asmithmd1 10y ago
What is an expatriate, someone who comes from a country you would visit on vacation? According to the article, at least one of the laureates is now a US citizen.
gpderetta 10y ago
I found this '/s' on the floor, I think it must be your.

tnzn 10y ago

Do we really need Nobel Prizes to legitimize migration ? I mean, why can't someone just be allowed to move because life is too harsh in his home country or because he has an opportunity or a family in the other one ? Because seriously, all those antionalists have done to "earn" their nationality is grow in the belly of the right mom'

flyinglizard 10y ago
The argument being countered by showing the origin of the 2016 laureates is that immigration is bad for the destination country; on the contrary, immigrants have fantastic achievements, both as scientists and as entrepreneurs. This is not about the wellbeing of the immigrants themselves. Arguably, tough (yet reasonable) immigration policies act as somewhat of a barrier, causing "good" immigrants to flow in, and restricting the bad. I mean, you can't argue that on average, the population of prospective immigrants is any better than the indigenous American citizens, but those who make it past the immigration hoops are, evidently, pretty good. If all immigration barriers were to be removed tomorrow, the influx of third world population would crush the USA - or any other western state - as we know it. The challenge of the immigration system is being tough but fair, where you let more of the useful immigrants pass while filtering out the rest. The American system is not there; it's tough alright, but it's still missing on a huge amount of human potential. (I'm not a US citizen)

punazj 10y ago

Hate to play devil's advocate. But there just might be a reason or two to explain Trump's supporter base without using phrases like "white supremacist" and "racist xenophobe"... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440334/immigration-national-academies-sciences-report-fiscal-economic-impact-native-born http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440334/immigration-nat... Bottom section is the critical point, about native born workers having 500 bn in wealth transferred from the labor class to the ownership class as a result of immigration. We live in a very comfortable echo chamber where we usually don't actually compete with illegal immigrants for jobs. Not everyone is so lucky. And those people deserve to be heard instead of being shouted down and drowned out with negative "-ist" arguments designed to censor them.

croon 10y ago
Sure. I actually agree with what you write... up to the conclusion. Why does this reasoning end up blaming people that by circumstance was born elsewhere for competing by doing a better/cheaper job, instead of blaming the system for allowing that transfer of resources between classes? Why not use $100bn of those 500 for betterment/education/job creation/etc for those less "lucky"?
- punazj 10y ago
  Because of capitalism I think, you can't just appropriate someone's profits, that's not capitalism. There are two basic ideas to solve this though, you can put more and more taxes on the capital owning class to "make them pay their fair share" for, from what I gather the humanists want, an unlimited number of economic migrants because it's the human thing to do. Now an important thing to note, might be Trump's comments in the second debate, that while everyone is going on about how he legally avoided paying maximal amounts of taxes (which I would do as well, I think most everyone pays as little tax as they legally can), Hillary's donors also use those loopholes. It takes a lot more research into the respective tax plans to see if "making the rich pay their fair share" is a campaign line or an actual plan, so that takes checking. I gather that the arguments against this are that if people can't be rich in the USA, they will go be rich somewhere else. The USA, from Trump's rhetoric, I haven't checked this, has some of the higher corporate tax rates in the world, and seeing as how manufacturing has already spread outside the USA, is it really crazy to assume the capital will as well (especially when selling the goods to America is facilitated by free trade deals that are in place, making it less costly to move your business to another country). This is the Democratic party tack to deal with wealth inequality. The second plan is to cause a shortage of labor, which would increase it's value, which would make wages go up. The common ways to do this would be: to make it expensive to import goods into America (which lessens the effect of labor in foreign factories which export into the USA) by getting rid of free trade agreements; and to lower the number of people in the USA competing for that labor. We attempt to do this by having an immigration procedure, with quotas, so that we can accept as immigrants into our labor force the number of people needed at various skill levels (this would be why it's easier for a doctor to get in than a farmer, say). Trump's "wall" is basically just a way to say "we should enforce the quotas that our immigration experts are setting so that our labor force isn't glutted by excess supply in any relative tier". This is the republican tack to tackle wealth disparity. The arguments against this are mostly humanitarian, from what I gather. A significant portion of the population consider's it America's duty and legacy to be the harbor for the indigent. There's also arguments for cultural enrichment etc. I think that's why so much emotion is involved in opposing it, and why so much backlash is rightfully indignant and angry. One side is hurt by this betrayal of the American identity by building a wall to oppress the poor and keep them from the upward path -- and then begins to call the other side hateful things... When the other side tried to start an economic conversation. This is just my interpretation of the situation.

klagermkii 10y ago

So where are the American-born Nobel laureates? Surely all six being immigrants it at least a little statistically strange. Is this a result of poor US primary education, an issue with culture, or something else at play?

rak00n 10y ago
It's statistics I believe. 6 billion vs 318 million. Beside that the people who get the chance to move to USA are cream of that 6 billion.

conjectures 10y ago

While on this side of the pond, amidst the Brexit debate, I note the UK born Nobel laureates appear to be emigrants. Maybe the US cup is half full?

dschiptsov 10y ago

That's the point of the US immigration system - to attract top 5% of the bell curve.

croon 10y ago
Yeah, I loved my NYC visit a couple of years ago. The statue of liberty was incredible, and reading that famous quote really inspiring: "Give me your healthy, your rich, your educated masses yearning to contribute significantly to our GDP."

NhanH 10y ago

I was curious so I went to check for historical Nobel prizes. Wikipedia helpfully has the list of all laureates by country along with their birth origin (0). 98 out of 362 American Nobel laureates are born outside of the US (Bengt R. Holmström was listed under Finland for some reasons, otherwise it would be 99/363). Also, first American Nobel laureate was Teddy Roosevelt. Now that is a surprise. (0): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...

iopq 10y ago

And none of them are illegal immigrants from Mexico

GnwbZHiU 10y ago
and none of them are Muslim immigrants.
- techer 10y ago
  And none of them American born Christians. What's your point? Last year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aziz_Sancar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aziz_Sancar

code_sardaukar 10y ago

In the non-Bayesian updating of progressives, if 100% of Nobel laureates are immigrants, this is evidence that diversity is good, but if 100% of Nobel laureates are born in the US, this is evidence of discrimination.

hugh4life 10y ago

And every one of them would have been welcome to immigrate before the 1965 immigration law. That wouldn't be true many past winners but it's still important to point out that nobel prize winners aren't exactly evenly distributed among the source populations of immigrants. I find it laughable that all immigrants are bundled under the banner of "immigrant". Apparently the category of "race" or even "ethnicity" should not be used but the category of "immigrant" despite origin is something that is of great value despite being far more general.

whack 10y ago
Are you suggesting that the immigration system should specifically make it easier for Europeans to immigrate, but not Mexicans/Middle-Easterners? Please sketch out some specific policy prescriptions.
- hugh4life 10y ago
  Immigration should be mostly skills based and there is no reason to use race or ethnicity for determining who immigrates. What I am suggesting is that this collective romanticism about immigrants is absurd. This was posted it the "latino" section of thehill to make an ideological point yet none of these people are of latin american origin.

hclivess 10y ago

sure they're all illegal immigrants.

mc32 10y ago

There is a difference between legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, immigrants with advanced education and immigrants with low levels of education. To evaluate the contribution of all of them together and say that the are the same is like taking a look at all Americans and saying, Americans are doing great, look at our per capita income. There is a debate to be had about who and how and how many people from where we allow to settle. We are outliers in how many people we take in. And I think we should tailor policies with the impact on Americans in mind. We're no longer in a steep growth phase, we're a mature economy which can successfully absorb so many new people into viable jobs. We need to work harder to get our underemployed better employed before we employ the surplus workers from elsewhere. That's not to say no immigration. Just controlled and proportional to need and population of origin so that both a Senegalese and Indian and Cuban have reasonable equality in obtaining a visa. There is no reason we can't set data driven quotas to allow, say, 2MM per annum to fill needs for ditch diggers and doctors, etc. But base it on need and do it with some balance.

golemotron 10y ago
The Overton Window on immigration is fascinating. We've gone from being a nation that that had selective immigration all through its history to one where trying to halt illegal immigration gets you labeled a xenophobe and a racist. Social media has made it worse. I think that it encourages preference falsification and causes inelasticity in the Overton Window. That inelasticity means that changes in public opinion are abrupt and usually need some concrete excuse to be justified.
- ardit33 10y ago
  That is not true, not for the first 100+ years at least. Until 1882, if you could afford the ticket to the US, you could come. So, at the time relatively expensive travel costs were the barrier of immigration, but not laws. "The Page Act becomes law. It's the country's first exclusionary act, banning criminals, prostitutes, and Chinese contract laborers from entering the country. 1882. Congress passes the Immigration Act."
TorKlingberg 10y ago

pornel 10y ago

Brexiters want currently legal EU immigrants to leave. It does affect science, because scientists and students who are currently working/studying legally in the UK may lose their rights. Comments stressing immigration laws are only about illegal immigration are almost tautologic. Of course illegal immigrants are illegal, but the real issue is who the policy makers want to declare illegal.

deviate_X 10y ago

I'm interested in the arguments against immigrants who have nearly nothing and little-formalised skills. Historically is there any information on the quantities of migrants who have migrated to the USA with highly-formalised skills, or who are already wealthy vs. those who arrived with nearly empty pockets.

internaut 10y ago

Oh you shouldn't have opened this can of worms. Now that you have done so, I have a simple retort. The only person of African descent to win a real* Nobel Prize was Sir William Arthur Lewis for Economics, and that chap was obviously fairly well anglicized. Just look at his bio! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Arthur_Lewis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Arthur_Lewis * If we're working with the colloquial meaning of the phrase Nobel Prize, then winning it for 'Peace', while honorable and relevant to Alfred's original intent, isn't an intellectual feat. Intellectual prowess has nothing to do with morality, noble though it could be. Now onto Muslims. From Wikipedia: Muslims make up over 23% of the world's population.[5][6][7] And as of 2015, twelve Nobel Prize winners have been Muslims. Again, if you discount 'Peace' then only 3 Muslims have obtained a Nobel Prize for an intellectual reason. If one categorizes writing as of equal intellectual consequence as physics or chemistry, you only get an additional 2 winners. The long and short of it is that African and Middle Easterners are populations which are in the billions but which have a single digit number of Nobel Prize winners. That makes perfect sense even if you don't believe race is a real biological concept since those are the areas of our planet that have experienced the least amount of progress, dare I say civilization. If you dispute the Nobel Prize as evidence of an objective way to measure intellectual prowess I'll completely agree with you (even though I believe more objective metrics are likely to yield similar results), there are many intelligent people who have performed feats who don't get a Nobel Prize, but then maybe it points to the idea you shouldn't write headlines like "Amid debate, all 2016 American Nobel laureates are immigrants" because that is total bullshit.

toomanybeersies 10y ago
Wouldn't it seem purely logical that poorer countries would have less Nobel Prize winners? I suspect that there are not huge amounts of theoretical physicists in Afghanistan. Trying to equate it to how "civilised" a nation is, is just racism.
- internaut 10y ago
  > Trying to equate it to how "civilised" a nation is, is just racism. Is that all you have got? Your ideals are intellectually dysfunctional, leading to stagnation, anarchy and death as they have done so in every age. The whitewash job on history is peeling off and every day that passes undermines your credibility. Watch, as Venezuela and South Africa collapse into an abyss. Watch, as each generation sinks deeper into poverty than the one before it. Working harder, for less, every day. Watch, as the fires rise in France and it becomes unsafe to walk the streets in our own cities. That is your work devil.