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Has President Donald Trump declared war on Albert Einstein?
“America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain,” The Economist warns.
As soon as the Department of Homeland Security announced Harvard University would no longer be allowed to enroll foreign students, the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer — a political scientist well-connected in Washington — declared the move “fantastic news for China.”
The government is trying to use its leverage over foreign students’ immigration status to compel Harvard to adopt stricter policies against antisemitism and scrap racially charged “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.
But this isn’t just another battle in America’s culture war: Foreign-policy mavens like Bremmer say what the administration is doing threatens national security and America’s technological edge over its rivals.
The Manhattan Project was a success thanks to émigré geniuses who contributed a great deal more to America’s World War II effort, and subsequent struggle with the Soviet Union, than just the atomic bomb.
And isn’t it true that something like 40% of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants?
Liberals might support high immigration levels, and large numbers of foreign students in particular, simply because they like the new and unfamiliar — though it’s hard not to notice that foreign students typically pay more tuition and pad the bottom line of our colleges and universities, just as immigration on the whole gives liberals opportunities to court newcomers with social services and identity politics.
Yet supposedly hard-headed realists say it’s not liberal ideology but America’s need for more scientists and entrepreneurs that’s the real reason we have to open our campuses (and borders) to the world’s talents.
After all, if we don’t do that, where else are we going to get the brains we need to compete with China?
The trouble with this tale, which is an article of faith for The Economist and the likes of Bremmer, is that it’s patently false — and largely intended to deceive.
In fact, very few companies on the Fortune 500 were started solely by immigrants; almost all were founded by Americans, occasionally in partnership with émigrés.
The source for the factoid, the American Immigration Council, has to fudge the numbers by lumping “children of immigrants” into the same category as “immigrants,” even when those children are born American citizens.
As for competing with China, how can it be that China itself is so competitive when it accepts relatively few foreign students or immigrants?
China, with a native population of more than 1.4 billion people, had only about 258,000 foreign students enrolled in degree-granting programs before COVID-19.
And while China sometimes claims to have nearly 500,000 foreign students overall, nearly half that number appear to be in non-degree programs: They’re not even full-time students, let alone Einsteins.
China’s economic and military competitiveness is home-grown, not a result of harvesting engineers from India.
America has a great many foreign-born Nobel Prize winners, to be sure.
But when America, and America’s campuses, have had more restrictive attitudes toward migration in the past, they have nonetheless competed, and won, at the highest levels — while developing countries, even when their most talented individuals have not been able to migrate, have not risen to America’s levels.
That’s not because individual talent doesn’t matter; it does, and the most truly exceptional minds, such as Einstein’s or other Nobel laureates’, should not only be welcomed by America but actively courted by us.
But where most people are concerned, even most people of above-average talent, the national environment counts more.
This is why the outlook of The Economist is so dangerous to America: It encourages lowered expectations of Americans themselves, with more disciplined if not more talented immigrants picking up the slack.
That’s the real brain drain: It’s draining the world’s intellectual capital to make up for self-imposed habits of failure in America.
The talented foreign student turns into an excuse for having Americans waste their own talents — not least by studying the kinds of highly ideological subjects that give rise to wokeness, antisemitism and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the first place.
The Trump administration faces another fierce fight in the courts over its attempt to revoke Harvard’s ability to host international students.
It’s a heavy-handed remedy, though perhaps nothing short of such pressure will be enough.
The most elite institutions of higher education in this country have long been a force unto themselves, even as they receive hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers and enjoy privileges for importing workers and customers — foreign talent and students — most businesses could only dream of.
A reckoning is overdue.
But Trump’s brawl with Harvard isn’t just about an institution — it’s also about the ideas that have led Americans to think they can’t succeed anymore, they can only import someone else to succeed in their place.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.