But you have to also remember that the current group of academics came out of PhD programs in the 1970s. That was a time of expansion in academia. These folks are just about to retire. On the other side of this, I think the universities walk a fine line with respect to graduate student admissions between foreigners and US citizens.
The fact that we bring in foreign graduate students from foreign undergraduate programs either means that our current system is not producing applicants of sufficient caliber who then apply or it is not economically viable. In that sense there is evidence that graduate student research stipends are depressed. Is this due to foreign competition?
There is some anecdotal evidence to this in that the majority of CS undergrads get a job ratherhe than pursue a PhD etc... b/c of the salary differences. Foreigners have to get a masters at a minimum to achieve better odds in the H1B lottery. And after they graduate from a US masters program, they can work at a US company for a couple years anyway.
Even killing the H1B program entirely wouldn't directly effect the ability of universities to recruit research/teaching assistants.
Consider if any US trucking line could hire literally anyone in the world. Wages would be below subsistence level. Which, well, lots of the Research Assistants working as Software Engineers for National Science Foundation portfolio companies are barely making enough to support themselves.
(Note: this doesn't mean the schools aren't fulfilling their educational missions, it just means that revenue is both necessary in itself and as such a core metric that is pursued.)
As an example, America would never have been first on the moon if it were not for a certain German engineer Wernher von Braun.
> The international collaborations that it thrives on are largely formed via exchange of students.
1) Students are on F visas, so they are unaffected by H1B changes.
2) There is no magical reason that students educated in another country in this day and age have a markedly different tradition of thinking about fundamental science. The internet has largely erased the differences in access to the latest research in top institutions around the world so the only thing that remains needed for high quality research is a pool of bright people. Perhaps there are some educational tradition differences between Europe and the US but US postdocs are largely educated in the US itself so those differences aren't really affecting current US research anyway.
3) Given the current labor and supply demand in academia, this pool of bright people can be satisfied by either US researchers or foreign researchers, and since there is ample choice between the two, the research of great import still gets done by just as many smart people as before, so once again, I fail to see the "problem" for great research being done.
If your goal is sufficiency, then the local population will suffice. If your goal is to capture as much of the truly top talent, you have to cast the net wider.
> Quality is distributed somewhat evenly.
Starting from that assumption (which I can agree with), here is a simplified (perhaps numerically inaccurate) argument. Assuming the top talent constitutes 1000 best researchers who have just graduated from their PhDs, and all relatively equally qualified, 500 US, 500 foreign.
There are 400 postdoc appointments. Currently if 200 postdocs are US and 200 postdocs are foreign and these H1B rules then inevitably disallow the next generation to have 200 foreign postdocs we still have 200 US postdoc candidates who are just as good and are still top talent.
Would this not still retain equal quality?