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Notes -
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rubio-says-us-will-start-revoking-visas-chinese-students-2025-05-28/
To what extent is this foreign/defense policy, and to what extent is this a fig leaf for prior CW against higher education and foreign students? Shouldn't we be trying to deprive the PRC of human capital? Being anti-CCP, I'm concerned about stuff like this, but a "to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students," where "Chinese student" is the only criteria given by the Secretary of State doesn't seem like a good idea.
Edit: A longer quote of Rubio, via Politico (???):
If anything, this just seems dumber - why is it "Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields," rather than "Those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party, regardless of citizenship?"
Noah Smith makes a good case that international students are good, but it's paywalled. However, here's a quote answering the question of whether foreign students displace or subsidize native students:
There is certainly espionage happening that needs to be dealt with, but the wording of the announcement would seem to indicate that implementation of this policy will, like most things to come out of this administration, be indiscriminate, haphazard, amateurish, and probably lead to a worse outcome than if nothing had been done at all. If anyone thinks we can win a cold war against China without immigrant brainpower, they are out of their minds. However smart you think white kids from the midwest are, they aren't going to become ubermenschen who are worth 4 Chinese apiece just because we banned affirmative action and are kicking out all the international students.
Depending on the amount of espionage we could in fact and quite confidently say we would win if we blocked Chinese nationals from all US STEM.
Wet streets don't cause rain, and top-ranked schools don't cause good students. If China didn't need our schools, their nationals wouldn't be here. If those Chinese geniuses are making such great contributions, they wouldn't have been let out of the country. There is an alternative explanation, which I'll address in a moment.
There were 76 million people in the US circa 1900 and they were 88% white. The American Empire followed, and it wasn't Chinese students building it. We did have a glut of Jewish talent but if anything the peak of our Empire was smaller than it would have been as their contribution was hastening the inevitable that was American victory.
There are twice as many whites in this country now, so we can also confidently say that just given a larger population there must be far more geniuses and far more overlooked geniuses. This relates to the alternative explanation, which is China does sequester their best and brightest, but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.
Anymore, be it either true success from China or paper success, there is no reason for their nationals to be allowed continued participation in US STEM. I do agree this plan will be haphazard and amateurish, but not truly indiscriminate, as their nationals in US STEM should be indiscriminately and unceremoniously expelled to the last. But we could reach a happy medium with reciprocity: they can have, given the difference in populations, 1 student in our schools for every 5 we have in theirs.
America in 1900 had open borders with the entire world except for China, and the Chinese Exclusion Act had an exception for an unlimited number of Chinese students. In fact, starting in 1908 the US government even used the money it got from China in the Boxer Indemnity to pay for the education of Chinese students in the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Indemnity_Scholarship
The politicians of 1908 America wanted to keep America white, but they didn't share the zero-sum chud mindset that a Chinese getting an education is the reason your cousin Trevor is working at Wal-Mart.
Yeah, what happened in China after that? With all that American-educated Elite Human Capital™ the country must have flourished.
Oh, right.
The quasi-westernized person of color raises hackles at the truth because his world swings upon the selective white humility he doesn't recognize as racism. Those WASP "EHCs" are sadistically racist, they're just so good at obfuscating it the person of color, only familiar with the boorish sort of racism from his countrymen, mistakes it for humility. Every measure of their ostensible praise is patronization, you cannot sing in their peculiar timbre the delights of folks of color without feeling to the marrow that infinite satisfaction in certainty of superiority at being born white. The most belligerent Xitter 1488-er can't begin to apprehend such intrinsic belief in white supremacy. I'll hold up my media literacy certificate and put on my serious hat, have you seen the movie Get Out? It's 104 minutes of literally this point. I digress. He knows the boorish racism and he conflates it with what he sees in America, not as substantive argument but as an appeal to aesthetic and a subconscious plea to mother and father WASP EHC to intervene. Unfortunately for him, though fortunately for greater discourse, the surging right no longer cares about being impugned by aesthetic.
I myself, as an enlightened centrist, never cared.
So you bring out the typical and lazy responses. "Cousin Trevor" or "Cousin Billy Bob" no, it's not the pejorative strawmen about people in very blue-collar occupations or the perpetually unemployed indolent who would have a spot at MIT if only they kept out foreigners. It's about what we know for a fact:
All compulsory American education is weighted against white male students
All non-vocational institutions of higher learning in the US are weighted against white male students
All STEM employment in the US is weighted against white male applicants
And I'll throw in a corollary #4, US corporations hire vast numbers of Indians because, chiefly, it's the closest thing to legal slavery
Nobody is saying the physics genius with a special understanding of reality is being kept out. Men of such stature are defined by their persistence in the face of adversity, they will get in, whatever it takes. What we are saying is most men don't know their calling, they choose a career and it becomes their calling. There are men who feel no calling to medicine but who would have made superb surgeons, same with civil engineers or simply as research assistants. But they've gone through #1 and they're in the process or they've finished #2 and they see #3 rushing toward them and they choose a field or employer where the hostility of modernity toward them appears least present. 70 years ago a bunch of men weren't doing nothing, "twiddling their thumbs" while they waited for Computer Science to exist. They chose among the options they had, and now there are many options.
Here's a question, how many South and East Asians now work at Microsoft? Here's another question, what's going on with Windows 11?
Oh. Oh God.
Fuck me, look at the output of that Elite Human Capital™!
I wonder why white guys might second-guess a job at Microsoft. Aside from knowing they'll have to make it through the gauntlet of interviews where, again, the policy is "Come up with literally any reason possible to not hire white men." In the rarity they do get hired, their reward is working with and for South Asians, Indians, who will only promote other Indians. "They should just deal with it." No, they just take low-visible-prestige jobs in small outfits and regional corporations with comparable compensation given massively lower costs of living and real estate. And some of them are unspecific geniuses, because there are more than 350 million people in this country and even at third sigma above that's quite a few. They didn't all go to Ivies, and they aren't all in STEM.
You know what else? Some of those Americans, all of them not just the geniuses, will have lost spots at universities in favor of Chinese or Indian or whatever other country's nationals, and I can provide you the exact number of acceptable instances for that to happen, the country over, totaling every student at every institution: zero.
America exists for Americans. If a Chinese national good enough on academic merit for Harvard wants to come here, renounce his citizenship, and pledge to help us root out CCP spies, by all means take him. Pay for everything, give him a pile of gold, we want him, he is elite. Objectively, for a university to take a Chinese national over an American and provide them with qualifications they take back home is a cost that will not be recouped. That is the rule, we do benefit from elite talent coming to this country as long as they stay. The experiment of taking in foreign nationals and sending them out with an American education in some hope of our later benefit has been an empiric failure. For decades almost every aspiring Mexican Technocrat got a US education, shall we check in on how we've both benefited?
(I'll let you imagine the cartel-chainsawed corpses.)
I will compliment you, though. By commenting here you prove yourself more astute than Hanania. He is a person who is notable in this sphere solely for being notable. He was relatively early on X, and that is the only compliment he could get from me, because if he fielded his ideas here first they would be trashed, because he did field them here years ago and they were trashed. I would trust him quoting you over you quoting him. The follower count is no endorsement, EHC knows this, many such cases.
Again, zero-sum fallacy.
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