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Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

Yup, so that we can loose our innovation edge and loose the next Apple, Google or Nvidia. Amazing plan.

There's a big difference between cutting off all foreign-born talent—and addressing the serious issue of graduate school turning into an immigration racket; the current issue with graduate degrees is a very close mirror to the issue with H1b worker visas. The abuse of both systems has harmed Americans—and to some extent the long-term health of the tech industry and the academy.

Would you be ok if the schools only allowed foreign students from certain countries?

> Would you be ok if the schools only allowed foreign students from certain countries?

Yes

Practically, schools already do.

American is built on immigration, and nearly all of us are immigrants or very recent descendants of immigrants. How in the world has immigration harmed Americans?

Ask the indigenous Americans.

I think if you're going to argue that we shouldn't have contemporary immigration because of the harm to native Americans, then you should show what harm is caused _now_, that native Americans actually oppose immigration, and probably that you support other ways of helping them like giving them land back.

If you go back far enough everyone comes from a line of invaders, so I fail to see how this contributes to anything.

Not a fair comparison.

Immigrants are not killing Americans en masse nor taking the land by force.

It's a NIMBY policy, pulling up the ladder. It's rooted in zero-sum thinking, that can't imagine "make the pie bigger" and can only imagine a fixed-size pie where their slice is getting smaller.

Given the impact the economy has on people's lives, it's an understandable fear. There's plenty of evidence for this not being the case (and in fact evidence for the "brain drain" strategy having substantial positive impact), but getting people to let go of a fear typically requires more than just hard evidence that it's unfounded.

(There's a separate branch of that fear, that imagines immigrants to be a drain on public assistance programs, but there's plenty of evidence that that is not the case.)

(Also, as always, policy is complicated and no comment that fits on a page is going to capture all the nuance of it or facets of it.)

Who cares if it's an easy path if the person graduates with the degree. It should be easy to immigrate here if you get an advanced degree. If you get a degree not in demand then you should be just as unhireable

A degree from Bullshit University in bullshitting should not grant any extra immigration rights because it doesn't mean anything. Although... the current administration must have high demand for bullshitters.

Bullshit university should not be accredited and BSU should be shut down. An unaccredited school should have no effect on immigration policy

Unaccredited universities are allowed to exist.

> Unaccredited universities are allowed to exist.

And so are anti-vaccine YouTube channels

What point are you making?

That after BSU loses their accreditation they should still be allowed to operate to keep their professors employed?

We were discussing immigration. An unaccredited university should have the same ability to help immigrants get visas as Best Buy.

Every country with benefits for old people dreams of being able to import high value workers who can provide those benefits.

> The abuse of both systems has harmed Americans—and to some extent the long-term health of the tech industry and the academy

Can you please explain how it has harmed Americans and tech industry and the “academy”

They already lost their innovation edge with TikTok but they were able to steal it back with brute force. They must be counting on doing that again.

A simple house in the South Bay is $2 million or more. Is this a win for humanity?

It’s one of the most desirable places to live in the world, why wouldn’t it be one of the most expensive?

The people who can afford to live here spend all their time working, and no time participating in the community, much less enjoying and appreciating the things that make the area special.

This is a non-sequitur. Making immigration impossible or stopping science funding or whatever is not going to change the behavior of a market profiting off of housing.

What's the relationship between this comment and the topic of discussion?

The point was - Do we really benefit from these companies in our backyard, or are they destroying local communities?

Is a trillion dollar company in your backyard really a good thing?

Is your complaint that you cannot afford to live in a place where intelligent, well educated people are getting payed insane amount of money?

And are you implying that the solution is to stop those highly desirable people from coming in because that will help you afford a place in South Bay?

In other words since you cannot compete with them, outlaw them?

I mean, yes, the benefits (and sometimes harms) of those companies to humanity reach multiple orders of magnitude more people than the microcosm of the Bay Area housing crisis.

We all know the actual solution is to build housing, right?

Could be the biggest own goal in human history.

It already is.

Fairly certain 1930s Germany ranks higher in this regard by quite a margin.

As I understand, 1930s (and 1920s) Germany was not a desirable place due to the losses from WW1.

I meant more of a place where things are mostly going OK (compared to most other places), and resources (human and natural) are available, so any failure modes have to come from within.

Germany flipped over the boardgame while losing, but USA flipped it over while winning.

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