Is nobody going to entertain this? Immigration opportunity is a major motivator for foreign students to get PhDs. And the university likes the cheap and captive labor.

What I really don’t like is that there are essentially rings of foreign professors within the US that only bring in foreign students, only write papers with them, review each others papers, etc. So you can end up with an American degree without doing any work with Americans, essentially having a parallel academic experience that mirrors culture of back home. And then use that experience to argue for US employment.

and stealing secrets for their home country