Well for one that viewpoint not only treats countries like people and people like property, disregarding the will of the actors there are many problems with the

Well for one that viewpoint not only treats countries like people and people like property, disregarding the will of the actors there are many problems with the argument. 1. Benefits and harms are not zero sum, that goes for "elites" and "common people" as well as countries. I thought the Coronavirus already demonstrated this quite well. The "common people" dying didn't benefit the elites nor the elites dying. 2. Even if we accept false premises of value it isn't a Ponzi Scheme. Even if it is an unsustainable demand for talent it wouldn't be a Ponzi Scheme. A Ponzi Scheme lies about generating benefits and instead just redostributes from new to old while escalating recruitment. For it to be a Ponzi Scheme no learning would be taking place, just idea extraction from immigrants and plagerism to attribute it to the professors. To put it mildly that is very counterfactual, akin to suggesting that crowds of thousands of people watching a musician perform is what creates talent and any rando you put up on stage would gain talent faster than if they practiced in an empty concert hall. 3. Just because they are educated abroad and the US benefits doesn't mean their native country is harmed or "harmed". They can and have enriched their native country either when they return or through remittances above what they earn domestically. 4. Source country interests may also be selfish. They may be glad to be rid of those pesky intellectuals with their "western" values of things like equal rights. 5. The entire reason many go abroad to study is because their native country is unable to use their full potential for whatever reason. That is like saying recruiting a subsidence farmer's genius son and training him to be a doctor stole hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the farmer because the doctor now earns that in the city. At most the farmer lost $400/year from a farmhand's labor. The entire intellectual frameworks involved are wrong on several levels really.