cynoscion’s blog

The Other Immigration Idiocy

In its email update of Feb. 10, the New York Times said: “Universities Rush to Set Up Outposts Abroad. The American system of higher education, long the envy of the world, is starting to become an important export.”The article explains how New York University received a $50 million grant to set up a branch college in Abu Dhabi. The article explains:In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts in countries with limited higher education opportunities. American universities not to mention Australian and British ones, which also offer instruction in English, the lingua franca of academia are starting, or expanding, hundreds of programs and partnerships in booming markets like China, India and Singapore.This is imbecilic from the American point of view. Although our government-mandated elementary education system is really bad by international standards, our free-market, highly competitive university system has long been the envy of the world. For years and years, the best and the brightest students came from all over the world to study in America. This offered America a number of benefits: The last point is particularly important. Very few college graduates have whatever it takes to start new businesses. You’ll find that a disproportionate share of the businesses in Silicon Valley were founded by foreigners who decided to stay and prosper. By recruiting students from among the best other nations could offer to found businesses here, we generate a great deal of income tax revenue for our government along with prosperity and economic growth for the rest of us.It’s vital to recruit the best students from every nation to come to the US and found businesses. When I was in college, a disproportionate number of engineering students were from Taiwan or mainland China. When they graduated, they went to work for HP, RCA, IBM, and other techno-giants; some such as Dr. An Wang founded businesses. Wang Labs generated major revenue until Dr. Wang died and his successors couldn’t carry on, but our economy benefited hugely from his business and technical genius while he was alive. There’s a Wang building at Mass General Hospital, for example.Countries such as Taiwan which lost their best people to us didn’t like the situation very much. When they asked their graduates to come back and found businesses, however, they received a polite raspberry — “too many bureaucratic horsefeathers” was the general sentiment. In 1973, Taiwan lost its seat on the UN Security Council in favor of mainland China. The Kuomintang government realized that world politics was running against them. The UN is made up of many small nations each of which has the same vote as the bigger nations. The Taiwanese government realized that if they could accumulate enough foreign exchange to bribe, oops, encourage, smallish governments to support their positions, they could preserve their power and influence for a time. The problem was how to get the foreign exchange; bribing an entire nation usually costs more than bribing a US Senator.The simplest solution to was to persuade their high-level engineering graduates to come back and start businesses, so they asked them again. “We said, too many horsefeathers,” they were told. “How about a bit less government red tape? What if we give you special zones where there’s less licensing, fewer permits, and so on?”"Not good enough,” the entrepreneurs replied. “In the US, we can start a business for $500 and a few hours filling out forms. We need special trade zones, that’s a non-negotiable, but the only way we’ll do it is if there’s no red tape at all. We can do anything we like. Import anything, export anything. Set up our own phone systems, electrical generation, port facilities, whatever we want. We’ll pay taxes, we’ll make you lots of money, but you gotta get out of the way!”The only thing governments hate more
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