“ Six of the eight authors were born outside the United States; the other two are children of two green-card-carrying Germans who were temporarily in California and a first-generation American whose family had fled persecution, respectively.”
Not in California. Last I remember, something like a quarter of the state’s population is foreign born.
> All Students in Higher Education in California
> 2,737,000
> First-Generation Immigrant Students
> 387,000
14% are first-generation immigrants
from: https://www.higheredimmigrationportal.org/state/california/
About 1/8 of the US population is foreign-born, which is a minority but not a tiny one. In California, its over a quarter.
There is a motivation that comes with both trying to make it and being cognizant of the relative opportunity that is absent in the second-generation and beyond.
There are also many advantages given to students outside the majority. When those advantages land not on the disadvantaged but on the advantaged-but-foreign, are they accomplishing their objectives? How bad would higher education have been in Europe? What is the objective, actually?
The US population is around 330 million. The world population is 8.1 billion people. What is that 4%? If you took a random sampling of people around the world, none of them would be Americans. You're going to need a lot more samples to find a trend.
Yet when you turn around and look at success stories, a huge portion of this is going to occur in the US for multiple reasons, especially for the ability to attract intelligence from other parts of the globe and make it wealthy here.
For an American, it's less of a good deal. Once you have the PhD, you make somewhat more money, but you're trading that for 6 years of hard work and very low pay. The numbers aren't favorable -- you have to love the topic for it to make any sense.
As a result, U.S. PhD programs are heavily foreign born.
Not sure if we can claim this any more, what with texas shipping busloads of immigrants to NY and the mayor declaring it a citywide emergency, and both major parties rushing to get a border wall built.
"Illegal" is a concept - it's not conflating to assume that it's not the bedrock of the way people think.
Illegal immigrant is pretty well defined, an immigrant that didn't come through the legal means. The people hired by Google are probably not illegal immigrants.
America is much more welcoming of immigration, by which I mean legal immigration, than Japan or China. This is not in dispute.
It is also, in practice, quite a bit more slack about illegal immigration than either of those countries. Although I hope that changes.
It's not? It sounds like you know little about the world outside of America. Japan is stupidly easy to immigrate to: just get a job offer here at a place that sponsors your visa and it's pretty trivial to immigrate. Even better, if you have enough points, you can apply for permanent residence after 1 or 3 years, and the cost is trivial. In America, getting a Green Card is very difficult and costly, and depending on your national origin can be almost impossible. In Japan, there's no limits at all, per year or per country of origin, for work visas or PR. Of course, Japan is somewhat selective about who it wants to immigrate, but America is no different there, which is why there's such a huge debate about illegal immigration (in America it's not that hard; in an island country it's not so easy).