> It was immigrants or the children of immigrants like Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann, etc that ushered the Atomic and Information Age, and it was immigrants like Hinton, le Cunn, Bengio, etc that ushered in the current ML revolution.
You’re not wrong, but America won’t accept it. The middle class has been gutted, and everyone is scrambling over the ruins of it to try to land in the upper class instead of the lower.
People perceive those immigrants as “taking a spot” in the upper class, as if there were a deity determining how many rich people we can have at some inflexible level.
I think people pervasively underestimate the value of education, in literal dollar terms. The US spends a crazy amount just getting someone through high school, much less college and a PhD. I would be pretty okay with a visa process for anyone that has a PhD from a reputable institution (where reputable only means “not a degree farm”).
Having someone with a PhD immigrate here is like their government donating a half million dollars to the US in the form of paying for the immigrants education instead of us. Their home country bears the costs, we reap the benefits. I don’t even really care if they speak English; they’ll learn, or use a translate app, or marry someone that can translate or whatever. They got a PhD, I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
The only real risk is crashing wages, but in a globalized labor market I don’t know if immigration is even relevant. Even if wages did crash, that might be a good thing if the crash wasn’t permanent. Cheap research sounds like the kind of thing that might drive us into new technologies.