Comment by leoqa

Go to any top STEM PhD program and do a headcount. I don’t know what’s going on now thanks to this wave of xenophobia and funding cut madness, but back when I was in one (Princeton Physics, that was last decade), everywhere I go it was at least 50-50 in terms of international representation. You can also count the massive number of clearly foreign born faculty. It could not be more obvious.

Edit: And before you mention O-1 and friends for highly accomplished individuals (maybe that's not affected for now? Honestly have no idea), this kind of policy has wide ranging second order effects even if it doesn't affect top talent directly. Like I said I was U.S. educated myself, once I would encourage bright minds from elsewhere to pursue a higher education in the U.S., now I heavily advise them from even setting foot in the U.S.

> Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically?

Most of them. We have normalized getting Bs and Cs in our schools. Our school curricula are mediocre, and our culture around education is as well. It is distinctly uncool to care about education here.

> Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?

Most of our best doctors, scientists, and engineers are all immigrants. Look at the ethnic breakdown of top AI researchers at the top labs.

> which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.

It's not just intelligence. Immigrants overall have more grit, more entrepreneurial spirit, and more ambition and willingness to succeed than median Americans. It takes a lot to uproot your life and attempt to make it elsewhere. The vast majority of immigrants I've met embody the American spirit far better than most born-and-raised Americans I've met.

> And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration

That we are making harder and needlessly painful, which will in turn reduce the amount of highly intelligent and capable immigrants we get as well.

The smartest aren't uniformly distributed across the Earth.

[flagged]

It’s a numbers game. Taking the best from the world talent pool is going to provide better results than from the much smaller American talent pool. Unless your country has more than a billion people, you need to look at world talent.

You reasonably might not. We would though. Who prevails, the small-but-concentrated interest, or the vast-but-diffuse one? It's the central question of all public policy.

Oh boy! If we are talking about constitutional amendments I can probably think of a few that would be much more important than that.

>Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.

Generally, yes.

But then there's Elon Musk.

Peter Thiel too: while a US citizen by birth, he defacto immigrated to the US from elsewhere (as in: moved from another country to settle in the US).

Immigration for rich folks is a bit different, see.

I'm born and raised in the US. I don't think it's racist at all, it's just true.

Go to any high school and see how little American schoolchildren care about academics vs immigrant schoolchildren. Academic excellence being uncool is baked into American culture. You're a "nerd" if you do well and care. Getting a B is "good enough." And "C's get degrees." This mentality is plainly unacceptable in most immigrant cultures.

I took almost two dozen AP classes in my day. In each one, the concentration of immigrant groups was far higher than the rest of the school at large.

Expand this out to college. Look at the admissions for top colleges without affirmative action. How do their demographics compare to the rest of the country? - MIT, 47% Asian. Berkeley, 41% Asian. UCLA and Stanford, 27% Asian.

6% of the US population is Asian, and 75% is white, and these schools don't have affirmative action. If all groups were equally competitive, admissions would reflect demographics.

(Ethnicity here is a crude approximation for immigration recency. I am not saying one ethnic group is better than another - simply that children of immigrants excel.)

The same goes for top PhD programs, the highest paying STEM jobs, even C-suite positions at big tech.

I am American and when I say that we have a problem where most Americans do not give a fuck about education, I am not being racist, I am just pointing out the truth. Over decades, our culture has bred an anti-intellectual attitude, one that prioritizes being cool and sociable over getting shit done. This is the antithesis of progress and ambition. It is great for sitting around and demanding handouts.

Immigrants more closely approximate the culture the founding fathers intended for the US. They uproot their lives to build something great. They get off their asses, do exceptionally well, and are carrying the nation on their backs. The rest of our culture could learn from them, instead of blaming our problems on them and turning them away.

A lot of American citizens are nonwhite.

By “American People” you mean native Americans?

Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant. Or are you referring to the Spanish that settled the west? The French in the far south? The Italians and Jews that populated New York? The British and Africans?

I’m painting in broad strokes, but to say “the American People” as if it’s somehow distinct from immigrants is just ladder pulling.

A distinct people? That's a myth. Every American is an immigrant, or descended from an immigrant.

Unless your people walked across the Bering Strait during the last ice age you're an immigrant.

> Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?

No, it couldn't. Trump tells them to vote a certain way, they do it. Look at Massie's primary as an example.

> "You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors."

I would challenge this. If you do believe that there are violent criminals coming through the porous border, whether it's 1% of the illegal immigrants or 100% of them, trying to seal the border off is not irrational. I'm not endorsing the physical wall itself, as I know a ton of illegal migrants are just overstaying visas, and I've heard of ladders and tunnels.

I think what's really compelling, and what the Left can't seem to relate to, is this: Everyone serious does believe the true fact that illegal immigrants have a lower rate of committing crimes than the overall population. But people who are victimized by those crimes have a valid point that those crimes are still incremental crimes - meaning that if we already had 1000 people in $BORDER_STATE who are going to commit violent crimes, letting in 1000 more people, even if only 10 of them (1%) are violent criminals, gives us 1,010 violent criminals. That's more crime than we had before. It's not like we get to trade in 10 of our own criminals for 10 immigrant ones.

Making no effort to control who comes here is irresponsible, because of course if there's a country that doesn't even try to vet you, and would feel guilty making you leave, of course criminals would be excited to go there.

Strangely, his current approval ratings on immigration policy is only about 37%. There appears to be a wide gap between what people thought they were voting for a year and a half ago, and what they are seeing now.

Why would they stick with the Big Tech companies?

If you just got massively screwed over by them (having upended your entire life in hope of getting a better future, then having that rugpulled), why would you get another job at that company with significantly worse contract terms?

Considering the rest of the world is reacting to the US setting itself on fire by finally stimulating local tech, why not just join one of the local alternatives instead?