5 ms·

The U.S. helps to educate and provide opportunity to people, regardless of national origin - regardless of the arbitrary, invisible lines on a map, drawn by the

The U.S. helps to educate and provide opportunity to people, regardless of national origin - regardless of the arbitrary, invisible lines on a map, drawn by the powerful, in which they were born. Partly as a result, the greatest economic miracle in history has occurred since WWII (and especially since the end of the Cold War), with hundreds of millions of people pulled from millennia of hopeless, abject poverty. Another great result is that U.S. businesses now have enormous markets in China and India in which to sell, vendors from which to buy, and more talented employees which to hire. China and India are the top two markets in the world for many products, including cell phones IIRC. Imagine the impact on the bottom line of SV companies if they went away. A smart businessperson wants other businesses to do well; they want rich, successful neighbors; otherwise, who do they sell to? Who do they hire? Who provides goods and services to them? Yet another result is that those people are familiar with the United States and its values, and can bring them home. Wars start because political leaders can propagandize about how evil the <other people> are, which is hard to do with populations that have direct experience with each other. And the values of democracy and universal human rights (i.e., regardless of political borders) have revolutionized humanity. And finally, due to immigrants the U.S. has become the academic center of the world. You may notice that much of the great scientific work before WWII was done in Europe, but then nationalism and ideology in Europe chased out their great scientists, who emigrated to the U.S. English become the language of science. The halls of U.S. academia have been filled with immigrants since then. If the center of knowledge and research moved someplace else, the U.S. will have lost what has really become an enormous, and really an unfair benefit. How much does SV benefit from all that research, talent, and knowledge at Stanford and Berkley? So I want more immigration, more opportunity for more people. How absurd that people with the talent and drive to get PhDs would never have had the opportunity. If the U.S. has to build more universities, that's great.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
neuromantik8086 8y ago
Academic immigrants these days are also potentially undercutting/warping expectations about labor in academic labs. 36k (for grad students) or 50k (for postdocs) are hardly acceptable salaries from an American perspective, but to folks from India and China those salaries are fortunes relatively speaking. To Indians/Chinese a 70 hour work week for that money might be worth it. Contrast this to past academic immigration in the 40s that you refer to, where immigrants were from countries with similar sensibilities and levels of development (primarily German Jews). I don't think that this necessarily invalidates your points, but it's worth pointing out that there are economic consequences when larger slices of the PhD candidates out there are from developing nations instead of other developed nations.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > immigrants were from countries with similar sensibilities People in the U.S. have been complaining about the 'values' and 'sensibilities' of the new immigrants since Benjamin Franklin would go off about Germans. Then of course it was Irish, the Italians, etc. etc. Older generations of Central European Jewish people even complained about the Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Of course, for most Americans, those people with the 'wrong values' and 'foreign sensibilities' are your ancestors. Human beings have their own sensibilities as individuals, not those of some country or ethnicity - people in my own family don't even share those things. I'm sure the parent would not want to be told what they will think and what they will do based on where they were born; that they can't determine their own character; it's absurd. And the truth is that when you give them liberty and opportunity, they thrive and share those same universal values. The track record is undeniable. So please let's not make the same mistake again. The sensibilities of 1930s Germany? Italy? Egads. Though I guess they also discriminated based on nationalism and ethnicity. It's a happy, wonderful thing: Let's believe in people, give them freedom and opportunity, and everyone thrives.
  - neuromantik8086 8y ago
    > The sensibilities of 1930s Germany? Or maybe the sensibilities of early 20th century Europe, which was friendlier towards socialist, pro-labor policies than both modern India and China (people tend to forget that the SPD existed before Hitler). I know it's a hot-button issue, but I'm not anti-immigration and you're preaching at the wrong person. I will strongly disagree with your somewhat extreme belief that sensibilities are purely individual; having lived two separate countries, with two separate languages and cultures, it's a bit quixotic to claim that cultural and other environmental factors are irrelevant, and cultural universals are notoriously difficult to pin down.
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      > the sensibilities of early 20th century Europe These are the sensibilities that led to the two worst wars in world history, that gave birth to both Nazism (and other fascists) and Bolshevik totalitarian Communism, that produced millions of people (in Germany, Russia, Eastern European countries, France, and more) who participated in or stood by while tens of millions were murdered in German-controlled territory and were starved in Ukraine? All those people were the products of the 'sensibilities' of early 20th century Europe. By the standards of some, the U.S. should never have let any emigrate.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
Your comment is excellent, and I agree with everything you say. I will retort, however, that we Americans should not take our technological dominance for granted, just as a precious generation of carmakers and related industries had to learn what happens when foreign competitors (especially with government support) eat up domestic markets that companies like Ford and GM thought belonged to them forever. I’m not suggesting that in 20 years Americans will do all their social networking on RenRen or shopping on Alibaba, but there are many, many high tech companies most people have never heard of, churning out profits and paying the taxes that support our society. The more talented, US-educated non-citizens we turn away after graduation, the harder it is for domestic high tech firms to form and hire. And another thing to note: just because the rest of the world is getting wealthier doesn’t mean they’ll share our values. The biggest geopolitical fucky-wucky of the post-Cold War era was the assumption that Chinese people would demand more freedoms like we have in the West as their living standards approach ours. China owns A LOT of Hollywood. How many big budget films these days criticize China or make them the bad guys? I grew up watching films that stamped “Russian” and “villain” as inseparable qualities in my impressionable, young American mind - at least until 9/11 happened and the Russians and Arabs changed jerseys. The economic development of China has been nothing short of a miracle for the hundreds of millions of poor farmers lifted out of extreme poverty, but at what cost to us?
- mhneu 8y ago
  +1 for focus on values. America itself would do well to refocus itself internally on its long-held values. (To do that, it needs to fix the huge right-wing propaganda apparatus in America, beginning with right wing radio. You can’t understand modern America until you listen to Limbaugh for a few hours. But that’s another story. Americans have to start thinking again about what their values are.)
- IllogicalLogic 8y ago
  The correlation of the rise of Europe/US and the decline of China/India (55% of world gdp at the time) is directly tied to a massive amount of illegal drugs pumped by US/England/France into China for a 100 year period. The reaction of a society to a forced drug epedemic will create 2nd and 3rd order effects (like a closed society) that are very easy to criticize today by people who are unaware of one of the largest poisonings in modern history (done by Roosevelts and Forbes family) ...but I digress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_%26_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_%26_Company https://imgur.com/a/eGdznWP https://imgur.com/a/eGdznWP
chrchang523 8y ago
I'm mostly with everything but the second half of your first sentence here, but unfortunately that embeds such a huge misconception that the net value of your comment could very well be negative unless you acknowledge and clarify/correct this. The boundaries of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. are "arbitrary [and] invisible" to some extent, and obviously drawn by the powerful. But "the current set of lines are arbitrary and clearly not the only possible solution" does not imply that "no lines is a better solution"; indeed, the latter has only been empirically true when there are preexisting strong and stable force(s) which perform enough of the function of explicit admission criteria to render the latter unnecessary. In real life, you find formerly-exceptional institutions which quickly and irreversibly declined to a lower level after switching to the open admissions policy that your phrasing advocates for (consider the City College of New York in the 30s-60s vs. afterward). Instead, the most impressive results in both hiring and immigration policy have combined race/nation-blindness with a distinct lack of blindness to other criteria which really do matter. You cannot do the latter (and perhaps more importantly, properly incentivize cultivation of the relevant personal and institutional qualities across the world) without maintaining some "arbitrary, invisible" lines across at least a multi-decade timescale. So, more immigration and education of foreign students? I'm totally fine with that, for both national and universalist reasons. (This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally. None of the 'frenemy' complications we have with China; I WANT Indians to 'steal' more of our tech!) But only on the right terms, which are not being offered by anyone using the language you're currently using in the second half of your first sentence. I suggest that you explicitly distance yourself from those people if you want the rest of your comment to be heeded by anyone outside your tribe.
- vkou 8y ago
  > This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally. India has only become a natural US ally fairly recently... And largely due to the 'frenemy' status that the US has with China. (Which in itself is a consequence of the 'frenemy' status that the USSR had with China... It's turtles all the way down.) Through much of the Cold War, US-India relationships were very, very cool. Instead, they had good relations with Russia, while the US had good relations with Pakistan. There's nothing 'natural' about nation-state alignment. It's all political, and politics is capricious.
mhneu 8y ago
What an amazing and powerful comment. We should all care about other humans in this world. (That said, not all governments care about other humans, and I tend to agree with crchang below.)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

neuromantik8086 8y ago

Academic immigrants these days are also potentially undercutting/warping expectations about labor in academic labs. 36k (for grad students) or 50k (for postdocs) are hardly acceptable salaries from an American perspective, but to folks from India and China those salaries are fortunes relatively speaking. To Indians/Chinese a 70 hour work week for that money might be worth it. Contrast this to past academic immigration in the 40s that you refer to, where immigrants were from countries with similar sensibilities and levels of development (primarily German Jews). I don't think that this necessarily invalidates your points, but it's worth pointing out that there are economic consequences when larger slices of the PhD candidates out there are from developing nations instead of other developed nations.

forapurpose 8y ago
> immigrants were from countries with similar sensibilities People in the U.S. have been complaining about the 'values' and 'sensibilities' of the new immigrants since Benjamin Franklin would go off about Germans. Then of course it was Irish, the Italians, etc. etc. Older generations of Central European Jewish people even complained about the Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Of course, for most Americans, those people with the 'wrong values' and 'foreign sensibilities' are your ancestors. Human beings have their own sensibilities as individuals, not those of some country or ethnicity - people in my own family don't even share those things. I'm sure the parent would not want to be told what they will think and what they will do based on where they were born; that they can't determine their own character; it's absurd. And the truth is that when you give them liberty and opportunity, they thrive and share those same universal values. The track record is undeniable. So please let's not make the same mistake again. The sensibilities of 1930s Germany? Italy? Egads. Though I guess they also discriminated based on nationalism and ethnicity. It's a happy, wonderful thing: Let's believe in people, give them freedom and opportunity, and everyone thrives.
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  > The sensibilities of 1930s Germany? Or maybe the sensibilities of early 20th century Europe, which was friendlier towards socialist, pro-labor policies than both modern India and China (people tend to forget that the SPD existed before Hitler). I know it's a hot-button issue, but I'm not anti-immigration and you're preaching at the wrong person. I will strongly disagree with your somewhat extreme belief that sensibilities are purely individual; having lived two separate countries, with two separate languages and cultures, it's a bit quixotic to claim that cultural and other environmental factors are irrelevant, and cultural universals are notoriously difficult to pin down.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > the sensibilities of early 20th century Europe These are the sensibilities that led to the two worst wars in world history, that gave birth to both Nazism (and other fascists) and Bolshevik totalitarian Communism, that produced millions of people (in Germany, Russia, Eastern European countries, France, and more) who participated in or stood by while tens of millions were murdered in German-controlled territory and were starved in Ukraine? All those people were the products of the 'sensibilities' of early 20th century Europe. By the standards of some, the U.S. should never have let any emigrate.

rm_-rf_slash 8y ago

Your comment is excellent, and I agree with everything you say. I will retort, however, that we Americans should not take our technological dominance for granted, just as a precious generation of carmakers and related industries had to learn what happens when foreign competitors (especially with government support) eat up domestic markets that companies like Ford and GM thought belonged to them forever. I’m not suggesting that in 20 years Americans will do all their social networking on RenRen or shopping on Alibaba, but there are many, many high tech companies most people have never heard of, churning out profits and paying the taxes that support our society. The more talented, US-educated non-citizens we turn away after graduation, the harder it is for domestic high tech firms to form and hire. And another thing to note: just because the rest of the world is getting wealthier doesn’t mean they’ll share our values. The biggest geopolitical fucky-wucky of the post-Cold War era was the assumption that Chinese people would demand more freedoms like we have in the West as their living standards approach ours. China owns A LOT of Hollywood. How many big budget films these days criticize China or make them the bad guys? I grew up watching films that stamped “Russian” and “villain” as inseparable qualities in my impressionable, young American mind - at least until 9/11 happened and the Russians and Arabs changed jerseys. The economic development of China has been nothing short of a miracle for the hundreds of millions of poor farmers lifted out of extreme poverty, but at what cost to us?

mhneu 8y ago
+1 for focus on values. America itself would do well to refocus itself internally on its long-held values. (To do that, it needs to fix the huge right-wing propaganda apparatus in America, beginning with right wing radio. You can’t understand modern America until you listen to Limbaugh for a few hours. But that’s another story. Americans have to start thinking again about what their values are.)
IllogicalLogic 8y ago
The correlation of the rise of Europe/US and the decline of China/India (55% of world gdp at the time) is directly tied to a massive amount of illegal drugs pumped by US/England/France into China for a 100 year period. The reaction of a society to a forced drug epedemic will create 2nd and 3rd order effects (like a closed society) that are very easy to criticize today by people who are unaware of one of the largest poisonings in modern history (done by Roosevelts and Forbes family) ...but I digress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_%26_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_%26_Company https://imgur.com/a/eGdznWP https://imgur.com/a/eGdznWP

chrchang523 8y ago

I'm mostly with everything but the second half of your first sentence here, but unfortunately that embeds such a huge misconception that the net value of your comment could very well be negative unless you acknowledge and clarify/correct this. The boundaries of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. are "arbitrary [and] invisible" to some extent, and obviously drawn by the powerful. But "the current set of lines are arbitrary and clearly not the only possible solution" does not imply that "no lines is a better solution"; indeed, the latter has only been empirically true when there are preexisting strong and stable force(s) which perform enough of the function of explicit admission criteria to render the latter unnecessary. In real life, you find formerly-exceptional institutions which quickly and irreversibly declined to a lower level after switching to the open admissions policy that your phrasing advocates for (consider the City College of New York in the 30s-60s vs. afterward). Instead, the most impressive results in both hiring and immigration policy have combined race/nation-blindness with a distinct lack of blindness to other criteria which really do matter. You cannot do the latter (and perhaps more importantly, properly incentivize cultivation of the relevant personal and institutional qualities across the world) without maintaining some "arbitrary, invisible" lines across at least a multi-decade timescale. So, more immigration and education of foreign students? I'm totally fine with that, for both national and universalist reasons. (This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally. None of the 'frenemy' complications we have with China; I WANT Indians to 'steal' more of our tech!) But only on the right terms, which are not being offered by anyone using the language you're currently using in the second half of your first sentence. I suggest that you explicitly distance yourself from those people if you want the rest of your comment to be heeded by anyone outside your tribe.

vkou 8y ago
> This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally. India has only become a natural US ally fairly recently... And largely due to the 'frenemy' status that the US has with China. (Which in itself is a consequence of the 'frenemy' status that the USSR had with China... It's turtles all the way down.) Through much of the Cold War, US-India relationships were very, very cool. Instead, they had good relations with Russia, while the US had good relations with Pakistan. There's nothing 'natural' about nation-state alignment. It's all political, and politics is capricious.

mhneu 8y ago

What an amazing and powerful comment. We should all care about other humans in this world. (That said, not all governments care about other humans, and I tend to agree with crchang below.)