Trump's Next Trade War Target: Chinese Students at Elite Schools

Certainly increased acceptance rates for domestic students would impact which schools they go to. But do you have any data indicating that a) there are a significant number of domestic students who apply to STEM programs and get rejected from all of them and relatedly b) the demand for grad school positions is sufficiently elastic to match an 80% increase in supply?

I'm not sure what your point was with the casual dismissal of 70 years of research in every field besides lithography. Am I supposed to think that international students only work on lithography? Most lithography research, as far as I'm aware, doesn't even happen in academia.

After university, many foreign students stay in the US.

Majority US-born teams are vanishingly rare at all of the tech companies I’ve encountered, and that includes some of the biggest companies to early phase startups.

I can’t imagine Silicon Valley continuing to function without a constant influx of foreign talent.

If you restrict the pool of applicants, the quality of the student body will go down. That's basically a law of nature.

Schools aren't accepting foreign students because they're cheaper. They actually have greater apprehension about foreign students, because their language skills might be lacking, and because the American professors judging the applications might not personally know the foreign professors writing the recommendation letters.

Science is largely done by graduate students and postdocs. Professors are busy writing grants, teaching classes, advising students and sitting on committees. Their role in science is largely managerial, and in providing overall vision. All the grunt work and detail gets done by people below them. My point is that having smart and capable students is critical.

If you go into a top STEM department in the US, you'll probably see that a large majority of students are foreigners. If you were to exclude them, you could replace them with Americans, but those Americans would, on average, have lower grades, lower test scores and less previous research experience. Their work would not be as good, and the productivity of the department would fall.

The excluded students would instead go to top universities in other countries. Those universities would begin doing better research as a result. My prediction is that within a decade, you would see Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley et al. fall off the top of the rankings, replaced by the top universities in Europe, one or two universities in Canada, and perhaps a few Asian universities.

I've seen the same thing happen with British exchange students in the US, and they basically speak English!

Thanks to the HN readers who defined "two minutes hate".

I think some readers of my original comment may be misunderstanding it. To clarify, I am happy to go into an equal level of detail about the many ills of American hegemony:

-False claims about WMD as a pretext for war against Iraq, resulting in an estimated 460,000 deaths [1]

-Four centuries of slave trade, which forced millions of people into bondage, resulted in a number of deaths ranging from 1.5 million to 5 million people, tore countless families apart, and continues to have socioeconomic consequences to this day, both in America and Africa. [2]

-The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan during WWII, which indiscriminately targeted civilians and killed 90,000–146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 people in Nagasaki. [3]

-Countless examples of backing authoritarian rulers friendly to US interests and engaging in "regime change", including the 1953 Iran coup [4], Fulgencio Basista in Cuba [5], and currently supporting 73% of regimes classified as "dictatorships" by Freedom House. [6]

-The idea of "manifest destiny" [7] as a justification to lay claim to territory that was already occupied, resulting in the deaths of 80-98% of native peoples as the result of diseases like smallpox, as well as outright genocide. [8]

-American involvement in the Vietnam War, which killed between 1-4 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. [9]

-Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and so-called "black sites", where non-US citizens are held without trial and subject to human rights abuses. [10]

-Mass surveillance conducted by the US government, including on its own people, resulting in an unknowable number of civil liberties violations. [11]

I mention all of the above in order to (hopefully) establish the fact that I am not simply "reading off the script of the two minutes hate." Or if I am, at least I'm reading off both sides' scripts.

That said, my original point still stands. I obviously have no data on the percentage of visa applicants who plan to use their education for ill vs good. In fact, I'm even willing to stipulate that the vast majority of those applicants fall into the more well-intentioned category. However, _if_ (and this is a big if) the intention of a student visa applicant is to commit acts which (hopefully) we can all agree are antithetical to basic human rights, and _if_ an American education would make them relatively more effective at doing so, then we all have an interest in stopping them from succeeding. That is true regardless of whether they do so on behalf of the CCP, the US government, a private corporation, etc. And importantly, whether there are American analogues to China's actions has no bearing on this point. It's pure whatabout-ism, and is a distraction from the point at hand.

I'm emphatically _not_ advocating for the repeal of student visas for Chinese applicants (I personally think this is a bad idea overall). I'm simply responding to another reader's question, "does it matter (if visa applicants study in the US or elsewhere)?". The point I'm making is that it might matter very much, and that exposure to or immersion in American democracy is not a panacea, especially when that democracy has significant and chronic ills which prevent it from reaching its full potential.

---------

Sources

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

2) https://www.un.org/en/events/africandescentdecade/slave-trad...

https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/18...

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...

4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh

5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

6) https://truthout.org/articles/us-provides-military-assistanc...

7) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples...

9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_the_United_States_in_t...

10) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/...

11) https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-su...