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Comment by onetimeusename | Hacker News Reader

Ya I wrote the reasoning following that. Look at these statistics[1]. It shows the ever growing number of foreign people earning both undergraduate and graduate STEM degrees in the US.

foreign students accounted for 54% of master’s degrees and 44% of doctorate degrees issued in STEM fields in the United States in SY2016-2017.

We rely on tens of thousands of H1-B visas per year to fill STEM roles which has been debated for years. We have accepted we have to import people to sustain our economy. I am questioning the merits and sustainability of these views and whether Americans have a unhealthy view of education. We certainly hold these visa holders to higher standards than ourselves. Why?

[1]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11347

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The report leaves out a crucial detail; the total number of STEM degrees increased significantly. Doing some backwards math, the total number of STEM degrees increased by 108% (x2.08) between 1988 to 2016. The US population only increased ~35% in the same period. Even if we assume the increase in the college age population was a bit higher (accounting for birth rate decline), the overall trend is growth in STEM degrees by both native and foreign students.

Given how much population and economic growth the main sources of foreign exchange students had during the same period, what we see is expected unless we actively tried to limit foreign exchange students. Native students aren't being replaced, they are still there.

We don't depend on visas to 'sustain' our economy. We use immigration to keep the massive comparative advantage we have had for the last ~80 years (since WW2). It's classic brain drain and the US has been on the winning side for most of recent history.

Top graduate programs in STEM fields recruit internationally, because they're looking for the absolute best students, and Americans are only a small percentage of the world population.

The US is extremely lucky to have a large percentage of the top research universities in the world, so every year, it Hoovers a fairly large fraction of the best students worldwide, who naturally want to go to the best programs and work with the best scientists.

This is a positive feedback loop. The US has the best research universities, so it gets the best students. The best students come to the US, where they do research and maybe stay on as professors, so the US has the best research.

If the US were to consciously try to "Americanize" its STEM programs, that would fundamentally undermine the very thing that makes research in the US so strong - its ability to constantly draw in the top talent worldwide.

Yes, I am glad you brought this up. I think there are trade offs. There is a benefit to Americans that they accept the best globally. On the other hand, professors and elite STEM grads do form a high status caste who occupy the most powerful government and corporate positions and professorships that make decisions that affect Americans.

Some of my favorite people I know are foreign stem grads. But I have also met some who have nothing but contempt for uneducated americans. To tie this to my original post I do wonder if this is not only a security risk but a cultural risk which creates a mostly foreign immigrant group with high caste status in the US that is hereditary/permanent based on university admissions policies. There is lowered expectations for non immigrants.

The most provable issue is the security issue though not the cultural issue. A thought experiment: would France or Japan or China accept that their most elite people are heavily foreign? Probably not. One can imagine why this might be an issue. Professors with dual citizenship can leave at any moment and during a war that could devastate us. What real loyalty do they have?

My remedy is to nationalize an effort to focus less on tiktok dances, followers, and selling foot pics and more on education. It's what other countries are doing and I am afraid if the US doesn't react it is heading towards decay.

> Professors with dual citizenship can leave at any moment and during a war that could devastate us.

Look at the list of people who developed the atom and hydrogen bombs for the United States. They were overwhelmingly foreign-born.

Imagine you moved to another country at age 22, studied there, got married there, raised kids there, and built your career there over the course of 20-30 years. You would not simply "leave at any moment."

Maybe, but as far as I know, none were Soviet citizens who came on work visas. Even if it were possible to emigrate from there, I don't know that they would have been allowed to be professors or grad students either. This was during the Cold War. In some ways we are kind of in a cold war with China right now where a huge % of high skilled workers come. We're practically in a hot war with Russia and I don't need to repeat what has been said about them. I am not trying to single any country out but I don't think we can say we have no enemies abroad right now. Surely this is something to think about before creating a caste of foreign high skilled workers and academics?

> none were Soviet citizens who came on work visas

Many of them were from countries that were at war with the United States, like Germany and Italy.

George Gamow, one of the most important American physicists ever, was born in Russia, educated in the USSR and began his career there, before defecting to the US. He didn't work on the Manhattan Project, but he did consult on other military projects during WWII. There are lots of other examples of Soviet-American physicists, including one of the inventors of quark theory (George Zweig) and the one of the people who formulated perhaps the most famous paradox in quantum mechanics (Boris Podolsky).

> Surely this is something to think about before creating a caste of foreign high skilled workers and academics?

Casting suspicion on students and scientists in the United States because they come from "enemy" countries is not a healthy thing for society to do. I also object to your use of the word "caste." Castes are hereditary groups with defined roles in society. What we're talking about here are simply smart people who did well in school, and managed to get into top universities.

Although a defector is not a temporary student or H1-B, yes it is complicated but you are saying there is no cause for concern even though clearly Soviet citizens would not have been allowed in such high numbers into important roles and I suspect people would rightly question the numbers if nearly half of all STEM graduate students were Russian right now.

I call it a caste deliberately for those reasons. It is hereditary I believe whether through socioeconomic status or genetics or culture or legacy status. It's already becoming apparent. There may or may not be social consequences. I fear there will be.

H1-B visas didn't even exist in the 1940s. I don't know what the immigration system was like back then, except that it was fairly racist (this is before the reforms in the 1960s).

Most of the foreign-born STEM graduates I've come across in the US are not from a hereditary caste. I'd even say most of them are from the first generation in their families to obtain such a high level of education.

Legacy is something very different. It pertains mostly to undergraduate admissions at elite universities, and almost by definition, foreign-born students are not the main beneficiaries.

Part of the foreign STEM graduate degree phenomenon — not all of it — is that foreign students bring in more money to universities. This is one reason why universities were worried about the sky falling during the pandemic, because they wouldn't be able to fill their seats due to the foreign student flow being cutoff, and even if they did refill the seats with domestic students, it wouldn't be at the same net 'profit" level in many cases, as they usually end up paying more in net tuition per credit.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1025193562/the-u-s-attracts-f...

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