MIT files amicus brief concerning executive order restricting travel to US
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
I can't help to be bothered by what could pass of hypocrisy at various levels. The article explains that 40% of MIT's grad students are "international". This means MIT's problem is a BUSINESS problem. At well over $50K per year per student the university-as-a-business (rather than an altruistic entity) is concerned about a drop in revenue should immigration policy change. Let's not pretend this is all about good intentions, pink unicorns and ice cream. This is a business fighting for their revenue sources. And they have every right --even the responsibility-- to do so. I respect that. No issues there so long as everyone is honest about it.
The other problem I have with all of these articles/arguments is this image being painted that the US would be dumb as a rock if it weren't for the influx of immigrants. I'm sorry, I don't buy that one bit. We already have great talent in this country. What we don't have is affordable schools (and books, etc.). A school like MIT (don't mean to focus on them, pick any school) can charge exorbitant tuition to foreign-born students and make millions. And the students pay for it. Not so with us-born students. Particularly given the state of the economy, unemployment, etc.
This idea that we better let-in hordes of immigrants for fear of not having businesses launched or any innovation is, well, repulsive. That would mean we are a wasteland of a country, and need to be rescued by immigrants, which clearly isn't the case.
This isn't to say immigration isn't good. I am not anti-immigrant at all. That would mean being against what allowed my own family to LEGALLY come to the US eons ago. No. My problem is with the fear-mongering that goes along with these arguments. It's dishonest and unnecessary.
It is OK to say we want immigrants because they are important to our continued cultural and economic growth. It's OK to say we want refugees because it is important to continue to define ourselves as a caring and socially conscious people. These things don't need to be embellished with "if we don't let immigrants in nobody is going to start companies, no jobs will be created and no innovation will be had". Sorry, immigrants don't have a monopoly on this. And they sure as heck don't have magical powers. We have lots of very capable and creating people already in the country. Let's don't diminish them to dumber-than-a-rock status.
As for MIT and other universities. They should be honest and say "we are going to lose a ton of money because we make a killing with foreign students". I can respect that. They are, after all, businesses.
On the other hand, if MIT had no foreign students and charged a LOT less for tuition it would be full of wonderful, capable, creative and eager-to-contribute US residents. The problem is very few can justify spending over $200K on a university education today. That's what these universities are trying to protect.
Undergraduates, however, are a different matter.
What schools are you pricing there?
http://www.collegeview.com/schools/massachusetts-institute-o...
Can't seem to find anything on mit's website other than something that gives 46k as the average for undergrads
Good luck fighting this fight here, though. It's like arguing that Star Trek is good on a Star Wars fanfic forum. They're just not ready to hear that.
And there's nothing wrong with that. They just need to be honest about it and not claim that we are doomed if we don't accept foreign students. We have lots of very smart, creative and motivated people in the US. We don't need to import them.
In fact, one could argue that our national interests are better served by improving our educational system (K-12 and beyond) in order to ensure that we produce better, smarter, more motivated and entrepreneurial people than anyone else in the world. If it is true that we need immigrants because we don't have them here then we have a serious problem that needs to be addressed at a national level. In other words, we are under-serving whole generations of students all the way down to K-12.
I agree with you that some of the positions might be a bit extreme: the US is most certainly capable of producing highly qualified researchers, entrepreneurs etc.
Edit: One more point I would want to add is that currently, US universities, and the US itself, is seen as a very desirable place to live and do research. This might change if the country institutes a policy of (implicit) religious discrimination.
Universities make much more money off their Masters students, most of whom are international, and pay full tuition (or someone does for them).
For MIT EECS (largest dep't on campus; ~700 PhD students) there's no Masters-only people (except MEng students who continue for a 5th year from undergrad). The department only accepts applications to the PhD program and funds its students accordingly. They probably lose money over their international students because none of them qualify for NSF fellowships, etc.
It's a scam.
The Ph.D. is the real graduate degree in US schools. If you get a MS, people who know the system expect that you flunked out in quals (it's the parting gift for those that couldn't handle the work). Terminal MS degrees at serious schools are just outright selling prestige to the naïve.
A MS from MIT or Stanfurd is much, much less prestigious than a BS degree from the same school and requires less academic rigor.
Personally, a research oriented MS degree allowed me to work closely with a researcher and contribute to that research leading to paper publications and a thesis. The goal of the program seems to have been to allow people to get a taste of doing research and then move on to a PhD program if they found that appealing.
Please don't put it in quotes because this is not what I said at all. I said it's a business protecting it's revenue source.
> At well over $50K per year per student the university-as-a-business (rather than an altruistic entity) is concerned about a drop in revenue should immigration policy change. Let's not pretend this is all about good intentions, pink unicorns and ice cream. > A school like MIT (don't mean to focus on them, pick any school) can charge exorbitant tuition to foreign-born students and make millions. And the students pay for it.
Most international students do not have the resources to pay for graduate school and are either funded via grants, teaching or research assistantships or personal-loans. In particular students from these 7 countries. They might have been doing well in their respective countries but the same money after conversion into dollars doesn't have as much purchasing power in the US.
> The other problem I have with all of these articles/arguments is this image being painted that the US would be dumb as a rock if it weren't for the influx of immigrants. I'm sorry, I don't buy that one bit. We already have great talent in this country.
Sure, all international students and faculty are evaluated at par with US citizens. Any bias here is counterproductive to competitiveness and research output of top schools who've signed the brief. So yes, great talent, enough to fill 60% capacity. That is not equivalent to dumb as a rock.
>This idea that we better let-in hordes of immigrants for fear of not having businesses launched or any innovation is, well, repulsive. That would mean we are a wasteland of a country, and need to be rescued by immigrants, which clearly isn't the case.
According to the article, "It cites one estimate that international students directly contributed $32.8 billion to the U.S. economy and supported or contributed to the creation of 400,000 American jobs in the 2015-2016 academic year.". So unless you mean that the total contribution to US economy was $32.8 billion and only 400,000 jobs in total were created in 2015-2016 academic year, the article isn't saying US is a wasteland of a country. Moreover students, post-docs and professors doesn't exactly mean hordes of immigrants.
> They should be honest and say "we are going to lose a ton of money because we make a killing with foreign students".
Again, most PhD students are funded via grants, which depend on good research output, which depend on a competitive admission process which selects the best talent.
>On the other hand, if MIT had no foreign students and charged a LOT less for tuition it would be full of wonderful, capable, creative and eager-to-contribute US residents.
If you say that MIT makes a ton of money by charging more from foreign students, I don't see how you can argue that by taking in none they can charge a lot less for tuition.
Bottom-line: I agree with the general idea of verifying what you read and reading between lines, but based on facts and not assumptions.
You missed my point. All of these institutions are grossly over-priced. This has been discussed on HN in the past. The cost of an education in the US is ridiculous. When a university has 40% foreign students and they --one way or the other-- pay exorbitant rates this only serves to skew the cost scale up for everyone else. Regardless of how it's paid, we are talking about $200K to $250K for an education, that's obscene.
Go to any research lab in the US; you'll probably see more immigrants than native-born. Far more, in many places. If America cancels visas and closes borders, it will still launch businesses, it will still occasionally produce a unicorn, but it will be crippled in basic science.
Conversely, we saw in the now (in)famous Princeton study that Congress doesn't care what you or I want. They only care what the wealthy want. We need the wealthy to advocate for proper education at the primary and secondary levels. And more to the point, we need them to fund it. This won't happen as long as they continue to have relatively cheap access to foreign labor via loose immigration, H-1B visas, etc. I'm not an advocate of closing the border, but the more we pressure corporations to need better local talent the better. Maybe a nudge in the other direction over time wouldn't be the end of the world.
But yes, as soon as I read the article I immediately thought of lost revenue from foreign students from certain countries.
That's a silly straw-man.
The reasonable form of the argument is about marginal effects: for each smart immigrant you remove, America becomes dumber, for each smart immigrant you add, America becomes smarter. That form of the argument is evidently true regardless of how many smart people were born in America.
> This idea that we better let-in hordes of immigrants for fear of not having businesses launched or any innovation
It's not that there wouldn't be any, just less. America will be poorer — not destitute, but less rich — if it keeps out smart immigrants.
If you read enough of these articles they all sound the same: We need immigrants because otherwise we will not have innovation and we will not have new businesses.
These arguments are not being made as mathematical or statistical realities, they are simple fabrications to produce emotional response.
I take offense to that. I'd rather we agree we need immigration and not justify it through fabricated logic.
> It's not that there wouldn't be any, just less. America will be poorer — not destitute, but less rich — if it keeps out smart immigrants.
I think you bought into the fallacy. We don't stop thinking, innovating or creating just because person X didn't come into the country. If Musk didn't get involved with Tesla someone else would have (another bit of misinformation, he isn't the founder). Would we have had SpaceX? Well, maybe not. But that doesn't mean we would have no new rocket companies at all. Look at what Jeff Bezos is doing.
Again, I am not anti-immigrant...I just want honesty in the discussion.
All of the better US public schools have the same dilemma for in-state vs. out-of-state students: the out of state students are smarter on average.
As a student, I'd rather go to school with smarter kids. Maybe you don't.
No, I am not.
You are missing the entire point. Nearly every article or mention of immigration includes some variant of the equivalent to (paraphrasing):
"Without immigrants our entrepreneurship suffers greatly".
I reject this with passion. We have amazing people already in the country, both native and existing legal immigrants. If we closed all immigration today (not proposing this is a good idea) we would have no problem at all maintaining a rate of innovation that challenges most other nations.
We have excellent people already in the country. We don't need to use this lie to justify the need for immigration. There are a number of very compelling and valid reasons for which immigration is important and should be encouraged. The above-paraphrased fear-mongering claim isn't one of them.
Sorry that this argument doesn't work for you. But yes, you are engaging in a variant of the "lump of labor" fallacy: the more great people we have, the more innovation we will have.
This isn't about not wanting immigrants.
This is about not creating false reasons for which we claim immigration is necessary or important.
That's it. Simple as that.
> the more great people we have, the more innovation we will have
Absolutely, positively, unequivocally false.
Innovation is NOT a function of quantity.
General Motors has over 200,000 employees.
Tesla had about 900 employees in 2010. They innovated the shit out of a market dominated by giants. And that's the story of every single small team that has disrupted market segments. Read "The Innovator's Dilemma".
More people does not mean more innovation. This is demonstrably false across a wide range of industries.
We do not need to import people to innovate and foster entrepreneurial drive. We have enough smart people already on board.
And the present system means that Americans are almost entirely blocked from pursuing careers in science by the awful economic prospects. Foreigners that come here can always get good appointments back home that will support a family if they can't get tenured in the USA. Americans would be out of work with zero savings and mediocre prospects at 40.
If you think Americans have something valuable to contribute to the world of science beyond than our cash support, then you can't support the level of mass foreign migration into science schools and professions.
Why don't Americans, discouraged by the economic prospects of our careers here go to foreign nations and support a family? Foreigners are willing to uproot themselves to start in the United States. And we are all better for it.
- MIT values the skills and intelligence of foreign grad students, who contribute greatly to the research enterprise.
- MIT's president is a Jewish immigrant from Venezuela who understands well illiberalism and is horrified by seeing in the US some of the things he saw in Chavez. Reif has been quite apolitical (see his bland letter after election), but the immigration ban has riled him up.
And... "President Pence".
The current 9th circuit one has a large chance of getting reversed on standing issues (en banc most likely), and honestly, probably should be.
Past that ,the real best hope is that folks like Thomas, et al will ask "remind me again why, if the constitution gives this power to congress, you believe it's okay for congress to give all of it to the executive branch"
But that seems unlikely. More likely roberts decides he doesn't want to be on the wrong side of history.
Given that the plaintiffs in the suit are people who have been denied entry by the executive order but have valid visas, I doubt standing would be denied. And I'm pretty sure one of the lawsuits has an affected green card member as a plaintiff, which is going to be very hard to deny standing to.
I'm very weak on civil procedure though so feel free to tell me I'm an idiot.
http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions%5Cpub%5C15/15-40238-CV0...
http://abovethelaw.com/career-files/lawprose-lesson-116-what...
Then he'll have a unanimous ruling in his favor in the new circuit.
Do you really want to hinge your case on Congress' ability to delegate power? I mean that COULD be a fun court case if you want to have it and make it a constitutional issue, because the whole executive branch, and the executive branches of every single state, would be ripped to shreds :D
1 million unemployed in the federal government, upwards of 15 million in the states!
but thats only possible if you believe the Supreme Court's rulings are based on a strict understanding of the constitution they are all reading, or if it is based on the past of least resistance. (its the latter)
the above argument has a thin chance of surviving in 2017
> The exclusion of aliens is a fundamental act of sovereignty. The right to do so stems not alone from legislative power, but is inherent in the executive power to control the foreign affairs of the nation. When Congress prescribes a procedure concerning the admissibility of aliens, it is not dealing alone with a legislative power. It is implementing an inherent executive power.
Trump's argument is not so much that Congress delegated the executive broad powers to decide eligibility of immigrants and visitors but that the powers are literally "unreviewable" by the courts (see https://www.unitedstatescourts.org/federal/vaed/358386/80-0...., I am not making this up). The response of the judge to that argument was basically "nothing can prevent the courts from reviewing constitutional arguments".
At some point, yes. Your other arguments are basically handwaved into existence.
Don't get me wrong, some of them even have precedent for that handwaving, but i'm always in favor of arguing based on first principles than "well, you guys have fucked this up for 50 years, so no point in changing this now"
"I mean that COULD be a fun court case if you want to have it and make it a constitutional issue, because the whole executive branch, and the executive branches of every single state, would be ripped to shreds :D"
You know, of course, that the whole point of having different branches was ... to have different branches :)
"the above argument has a thin chance of surviving in 2017 "
Probably, but like most other arguments based on judicially created rights, i think others are even more tenuous over time, and are just kicking the can down the road.
See right to privacy, etc.
At some point, it needs to be grounded in the actual text of the constitution, or it just erodes. There is nothing in the constitution granting green card/etc holders any rights directly at all.
It's indefensible IMO not to stand behind their community, many of whom are Iranian.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/825502400454594561
He has continued to have meetings with the current administration since it was issued though.
"Please read immigration order. Lmk specific amendments. Will seek advisory council consensus & present to President." https://t.co/qLpbsP4lEk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2017
you know what this sounds like.. "Where in the world does it say that it is un-constitutional, show me proof"
try to read between the lines..
now please send me into a downvote oblivion
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/825502618680045568
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/827924171661377536
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/828280866451374085
He doesn't like it, but he thought that specific suggestions for changes would help to mitigate the damage.
Now he has deals with NASA and the govt. and is directly being profited. You dont see the conflict of interest ?