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Do they leave? I work with tons of very smart foreigners who got an advanced degree at an American university, so they can't all be leaving. We'd definitely be worse off if we can't brain drain the world anymore.
And let's not forget that Trump once proposed a drastic solution to retain international students:
As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in. I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science. The foreign students I have interacted with are usually at around the same level as the domestic students but are more desperate because they are trying to escape from a shithole. Automatically giving green cards to people would just make the situation worse by further increasing the pool of labor available for exploitation.
As for the ones who stayed, how many of them are actually doing science? I bet the majority of them used it as a pathway into the us labor market and are now working fairly standard jobs. Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).
What fields have you observed this in? In capital intensive STEM research, the senior grad students and postdocs do all the work and the PIs are out of touch managers who have to spend all their time grubbing for money. I could see your statement being true for like economics or something, but it is not at all what I observed in the hard sciences.
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Indeed I work in industry, not academia, but I don't see it as any way bad if foreign students use American academia as a stepping stone into American industry. It's still a net benefit to the US.
It's unlikely that these jobs would have been filled at a higher cost on account of the cost already being very high. It's more likely that the job would have been not filled or filled with inferior people.
An example of the top of my head - all but one of the authors of Attention is All You Need are foreigners. I don't know if you count Google Research/Brain as a "fairly standard job" but it's pretty obvious to me that there aren't seven foreigners on this paper because they're cheap.
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