Comment by thinkingtoilet
4 days ago
It's not even brain drain, America's dominance came from the fact that for nearly a century the brightest people in the world were willing to give up everything to come here. That is no longer the case. Today's Einstein probably isn't going to immigrate here.
That is still the case and no where else is even close.
https://www.statista.com/chart/30815/top-destination-countri...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world...
Does a want to immigrate necessarily mean that the US is the most favoured destination for the world’s intellectuals?
It might, but how do you measure that?
I just want to point out that germany and US have a similar number when adjusted to it's respected population size (I think it's even a little bit higher).
I am kinda surprised to see it so far on the top
Today's Einstein ARE immigrating to US for such positions as finance, adtech and management, ones that explicitly produce no physical artifact.
Unfortunately, I spent more than a trivial amount of time wondering what an Einstein of Adtech looks like.
Is adtech the new pejorative for Facebook & co?
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But not for the hardware that powers the white collar. China is taking those.
Exactly. Something is penalizing or inhibiting manufacturing in developed countries. That something is just regular progression on the ladder of classical infinitely extending three-sector model[1] and gradual obsolescence of its lower rungs, but that is problematic, and without healthy preceding sectors for each, it's just a measuring contest being held in a skydiving.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector
Einstein didn't emigrate to get rich, he emigrated because the Nazi's took over Germany. Germany had the best universities in the world before they took the path of self-destruction. So that was a second, separate event that helped America.
America stills gets a lot of immigrants.
Well, hopefully nothing like that happens in the US - that is to say an ideologue that ruins a country by ostracizing and then removing skilled immigrants or deters them from coming in the first place. Perhaps we can examine some recent large scale survey data to determine if the US populace gives a shit.
Pretty sure the use of "Einstein" here is symbolic, not literal.
So use a different example? Einstein isn’t interchangeable, lol.
For nearly a century Europe incinerated itself twice over.
> That is no longer the case.
For all I shit relentlessly on this country and its culture, it's still an extremely attractive place to live if you're well-situated to make money. (Most people are not—hence my contempt for how the society functions. This presumably DOES apply to an "Einstein", if indeed this Einstein wants money.) China still has a way to go in catering to and granting citizenship (or some amenable equivalent) to foreigners.
Going through the _legal_ immigration in the US is hell. Even if you're immigrating through a "talent" visa. Never mind regular work visa/GC.
Well, what's the alternative? Live in some poor country with a happy and contented existence? Fuck no, I want money: happiness is for suckers
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You make a good point about China. It’s still an ethnostate, and I don’t see how it can reconcile such a strong ethnic nationalist identity with its own demographic crisis and competition for labor from abroad.
>if you're well-situated to make money
so basically, like everything else, you make a lot of money but it isn't a great place to live unless you make ALL the money.
The US didn't win World War 2, break the sound barrier, or put a man on the Moon only or primarily due to immigrant workers. We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent. Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.
We literally put a man on the moon because we acquired Werner Von Braun and used his plans... I mean, we probably would have eventually done it, but the timeline likely would have been different and the soviets might have beaten us to the moon, but the time line we are in, we had a space program as successful as it was because we acquired German scientists who were already thinking about these problems a even a decade or so before we started to invest into it.
1,200 men of the same ethnic and religious background of the median American, brought over in a one-time arrangement in the wake of the most destructive war ever fought, versus 100,000 Indian H1B visas granted annually. That's just India, not counting other countries or visa types. Okay. Sure. Totally the same. We couldn't have made it back to the Moon without a million indentured IT workers.
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That team was one of three that was developing rockets. The others were air force and navy.
>Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.
Except many of us can trace our family lines to immigration. On one side I have to go back to the early 1800's to see when they immigrated, but this is literally a country of immigrants. (other half of the family is late 1800s/early 1900s immigration)
Even today I would assume the average American doesn't have to trace back more than 100-150 years to see when part of their family moved here.
>We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent.
Don't even get us started on ahistorical nonsense when you just want to make things up. Not when talented folks[0] had to work through system that didn't want them so they could eventually make all the difference.
[0]https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/hidden-no-more-...
I hear you, I took umbrage with that comment as well. But I think it’s fair to consider whether we are doing enough for Americans just as we are welcoming newcomers to settle here at the same time? My experience as a native born Californian, raised by a single immigrant mother living in urban poverty is no, we do not. Granted I escaped poverty by self-funding my engineering education (Federal Loans and working full time) but it took the better part of my 20s to do so, at great personal cost and risk. In many ways that experience taught me just how unfairly stacked the odds are against the working poor, let alone their children.
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Our German scientists were better than their German scientists. We had no real science PhD programs until the 1920's. We had no scouting for young minds until the 1950's.
Our Jews from Odessa were better than theirs too.
> Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.
Most of those native-born Americans were the children or grandchildren of immigrants.
What do you think a nation is? Is it a sports team or economic zone that hands out name tags to whoever steps off the boat with the right attitude? Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny? I submit to you that it's the latter, and no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.
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I wouldn't say most native borns "built" the US. But sure, there are plenty of native born leaders who set the direction towards building such stuff.
> The US didn't win World War 2
The USSR would like a word.
The USSR never did pay us back for the massive, unprecedented, war-winning aid we delivered to them under Lend-Lease. Half a million trucks, thousands of tanks, tens of thousands of airplanes, millions of tons of food. And what did we get out of it? An implacable evil empire that sat like a boot on the neck of Eastern Europe for another 50 years after our "victory."
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Unless your ancestors crossed the Bering Strait ten thousand years ago, calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing.
If you only came across ten thousand years ago, you are just a colonist that killed and displaced the people who came across sixteen thousand years ago. But that said, native born has a definition, and it is where you were born, not where your parents, grandparents or grand^14 parents was born.
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You would never apply this reductive, solipsistic lens to any non-white ethnicity or culture and I think you know it
What’s magic about the Bering strait?
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It is kind of disingenuous and dishonest to say that there is no value or meaning on those Americans born in American soil, a nation should prioritize the people that live on it or well at least care for them and make them useful for nation building in the future.
Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective. So yeah there is a meaningful difference and saying native born in this context allows us to steer the conversation towards taking care towards those in the country already, which is something that neolib governments have not done in the last decades.
I say this as a person that was not born in the country he resides in now, but saying "calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing " is a dishonest way to try to dissuade and delete necessary words that work towards more fruitful conversatons about how to improve th esytems in North America.
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If you want to pick an era of technological progress to make that point maybe don't pick the one that involves America becoming a superpower by putting a bomb invented by Jewish refugees on a rocket build by ex Nazi scientists after a physics revolution where be basically got to go and take all of Germany's top talent lol
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