Originally Posted by Lockheed Martin
1. That's 13% of GRADUATE students...a tiny fraction of the overall total. Most college revenue comes from undergrads, which are overwhelmingly native born.
2. The vast majority of foreign students in the US and Europe are on temporary student visas. When they complete their education, they go home. Restrictions on permanent immigration would have no impact them.
It's even higher here in the UK. Considering foreign students pay much more to study in western higher-education, that's a massive loss in terms of revenue for universities.
No, it would be a drop in the bucket, even if you lost all the foreign students (but, as we've seen, you'd actually lose very few).
That translates either to a massive hike for home students, which will discourage all but the most privileged from attending or a drop in the quality of facilities, which will damage the west's competitive edge in high technology.
How so? The reason that third world students come to the West for technical education is that their own countries lack the means to provide that education. The limitations of non-Western higher education systems would keep them running behind regardless.
Regardless of direct financial consequences, this would constitute a crippling brain drain for the west. We're already running low on hard-science graduates as more and more people opt for, haha, "degrees" in media studies or art history.
Source:
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1998/nsf9895/math.htm
1. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US job market in hard science fields is very tight (primarily due to outsourcing those jobs to foreign countries), and the pay and benefits in relation to costs of an advanced graduate school education are not favorable. Foreigners will work for less than Americans and Europeans, so those fields become less appealing. If the job markets weren't flooded with foreigners willing to work for 20-30% less than their native born counterparts, Americans and Europeans would make the investment in a hard science graduate education in much larger numbers. This is one of those 'jobs that Americans won't do' arguments that is really a 'jobs Americans won't do on the cheap' argument. Tech companies have extremely high profit margins, they can absorb the cost of paying all their workers at the going rate for Americans in the field.
2. You seem to be ignoring the big picture in this argument, which is that I don't care about maintaining a high-technology existence, and, in fact, want to see it rolled back to protect humanity from its own overconsumption.
The west isn't training enough doctors. In the UK they're paid the same wage as doctors born here.
Which is a **** wage in comparison to the cost of eduction due to the NHS.
The US has and will continue to have plenty of native borns to fill the specialist positions, oncologists and the like, who make enough to more than compensate for the costs of education. The problem is for GP's, who by and large don't. The solution is pretty simple though. The state needs to subsidize the cost of education for all med school students. If the cost of becoming a doctor goes down, you'll have a lot more people going into the field. We have an RN shortage too, which could at least be partially alleviated through the same means. Especially if the state would partially underwrite salaries as well to make it a more financially lucrative option.
Wait. How do you know how much undocumented workers are being paid? That's like saying "unreported crime is on the rise". There are no figures.
Simple, we know what companies in fields that primarily employ immigrant (often undocumented) labor are paying. And while it's less than they used to pay (in fields like construction and warehouse work), it's still well above minimum wage.
Source:
http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/60009
Specific to Utah, but makes an important point. Particularly the "agricultural labour" native-born workers don't want to do. Lose them, and you might see that grain surplus diminished.
Grain crops don't rely on immigrant labor, which is mostly reserved for labor intensive 'picking' crops like lettuce and fruit, which Americans could easily afford to pay more for, and would. Staples aren't labor intensive. They're grass man. You sow it, you grow it, you mow it.
Hubris. You may be able to hermetically seal borders against people getting in, but do you propose you also stop people leaving?
If the jobs are HERE, they won't have to leave on contract work abroad, and they won't. And how do you square this with your notion that all these foreign countries would suddenly cut off all trade contacts with the West if the West brought its immigration policies in line with the immigration policies already practiced by the rest of the world.
You're right on the first point, although it's an interdependence. That's the heart of globalisation. By the way, america's not the only country with a surplus. The eastern-european nations have been over-producing grain for years
Not in quanities large enough to make up for American grain if it were taken off the market.
and India has a mountain of the stuff:
India remains a net grain importer, however, and this will only get worse as its population grows AND the country continues to put most of its resources into urban technological infrastructure. It produces surpluses that it cannot deliver even to home markets because it lacks the internal infrastructure for distributing and storing surplus. The government isn't investing in developing this infrastructure because it is, for the time being, simply cheaper to buy American grain. The problem for India is that they are experiencing explosive population growth and, at the same time, their agricultural labor force is shrinking due to economic boom in the cities. Agricultural production and the ability to distribute it are not likely to keep up with increased demand, and it is highly unlikely that the government will take the necessary steps to shore up the infrastructure.
[quote]As for China...
Source:
http://www.inquit.com/chinas-food-imports-in-perspective
[quote]
This is actually something I've studied fairly intensely, and I disagree with the article's conclusions. China's agricultural shortfalls are related in part to the rising demands of wealth, but they are primarily the product of structural deficiencies in the post-Reform Chinese economy. The government poured enormous resources into modernizing China's urban regions and particularly into developing the nation's high tech capabilities, totally ignoring the agricultural sector, which has continued to muddle along with equipment and techniques that were obsolete at the time of Mao's death in 1976. Their agricultural techniques are MUCH more labor intensive than those of Western nations, but the combination of China's one child policy and the economic explosion in the cities has combined to reduce the rural agricultural labor force. There's no way that China can keep up with domestic demand unless it makes fundamental changes in how it allocates its resources internally, and it won't do that so long as high tech industry for the foreign market remains the goose that laid the golden egg. This is precisely the same phenomenon we saw in China during the last great wave of globalization (the 1920s), and when the crash came, the results were catastrophic (and, ultimately, resulted in the Maoist triumph).
But can US farmers survive without selling their grain to the third world?
As I've already indicated, the third world can't get by without US farmers. They're in no danger.
Addressed above. I think China and India could survive without US exports, and even if they experienced a deficit that might threaten their political stability (which would have to be huge, China is a very stable country, much more so than your average western liberal democracy)
What the hell are you talking about? China has endured multiple civil wars since the mid 19th century alone. We're less than 20 years removed from a massive internal dislocation that had to be suppressed with the full weight of the PLA. There are seperatist groups active in the northwest, and outside of their traditional heartland, the Han Chinese are HATED by the many ethnic minority groups. If someone has told you that China is more stable than Western liberal democracies, you've been sold a bill of goods.
On what do you base the 10% figure?
The very worst years of the Depression saw unemployment rise to 22%, and the US economy is far more resistant to massive dislocation than it was in those days. A rise to 10% would see unemployment go up my more than 100%, that's a huge jump. I just don't see even the worst trade war having anything like the kind of adverse consequences that the Depression.
Did I mention Mexico? Or Honduran? My point was we rely on China, India and Russia.
Immigration from these countries to the US is negligible. Your whole theory relies on the Chinese, the Russians and the Indians being willing to cut themselves off from Western markets if the West closes its borders to third world immigration.
My particular example was Russian oil and gas. If we close our borders to these countries it'll be taken as a snub, which it is.
And how would closing the borders to IMMIGRATION be a snub to Russia? The Russians don't care about immigration, they care about access to markets. You're spinning a nightmare fantasy on the basis of a reaction that would never occur.
These nations tend to be very capricious. I wouldn't be so quick to predict the actions of peoples who change their leaders more often than most people buy new jeans.
Russia has had two leaders in the last 15 years. China has had the same ruling cabal since 1977. Both countries have latent instabilities that could easily explode into civil war granted the right impetus (and Western countries cutting off immigration from nations that aren't Russia or China isn't going to be one of them), but neither of them is 'capricious' or unpredictable on the world stage.
There have been countless instances of western business having their fingers burned in the developing world by assuming their rules work the world over.
Sure, corruption in the developing world can bite big time, but saying that China is corrupt is not the same as saying that the Chinese government will act counter to its own interests just to spite the West. There aren't any altruists in the Beijing regime (or the Kremlin, for that matter).
My point is that closing western borders could have a dangerous geo-political domino effect. Not to mention that the chinese elite aren't likely to take kindly to being denied the priviledge of buying a New York summer pad or sending their children to Oxford, Harvard or MIT.
How would closing the borders to
permanent immigration accomplish any of that? Not to trade. Not to student visas. Not to tourism. PERMANENT IMMIGRATION.
You're talking out your ass.
It'll be hard for the west to impose its will on the world, or maintain its various economies without young people.
You seem to operate under the notion that I give a rat's ass about maintaining Western hegemony and hypertechnological society. I don't. I couldn't care less.
The pensions alone could throttle even the most advanced state, and who'd serve in the armies?
The US is already moving towards fielding a robot army, they're talking about shipping 10,000 of the things to Iraq. But that's really a side issue. I WANT to see the collapse of the current social and economic order. It is necessary to preserve a future for humanity.
It's all well and good to demand smaller ecological footprints in the west by letting the population wither, but that's not going to stop China building cheap coal-fired power stations or dumping arsenic in the rivers.
The incentive to do so goes away when the markets do.
In the west we're developing technologies to reduce our carbon footprints, from sequestering carbon for clean-burning coal to perfecting solar power, Germany has made some marvellous advances in this field.
Sure we are, but reducing carbon footprint in world with 10 billion humans won't matter. You can't reduce carbon footprint faster than population growth, and there's no political will in the biggest offenders (the US chief among them) to implement technological changes anyway due to the expense. The Western lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable. It requires far too much in the way of space, food and energy outlays. These are all finite, and all come at the cost of the natural environment.
And none of that addresses the problems of feeding, clothing and housing an exploding third world population without destroying ecosytems to do so, even if we don't take into account THEIR desire to live at a Western level.
Also, the middle classes seem to have taken up the eco-cause with avengence and any reader of decent socio-political literature will know that once the middle classes care, the gears of government start to grind into action.
The cream of the middle class was fired up about Maoism in 1968 too, but guess what, we're not addressing our heads of government as Comrade Chairman...
Agreed. But, how would you rather do it? The complicated way of sophisticated psychological and emotional attack on the common people through the media, celebrity endorsements and the twin evils of lobbyists' rhetoric and political self-interest or just killing everybody? Guilt, shame and duty mould the public mind and once you have a grasp on that, you can do more than simple destruction ever will. (copyright, Niccolo Machiavelli)
First step: remove the hand of pity. If Africans starve, they shouldn't have overgrazed their habitat. If ghetto children can't get medical care, well, that's a side effect of having children you can't afford.
Second step: education
Third step: a sensible program of eugenics
Hypertechnical society is all that can save us at this point. There's a famous quote by someone I can't quite remember the name of, but it runs something like: "There are two cliff faces, between which there is a void. Technology has built a bridge of light half-way across and we now stand directly over the maw."
We can't return to the side we started at.
Sure we can, we just have to kick the dead weight off into the chasm.
Most credible scientists agree that the ecological damage we have inflicted has reached the point of no return. Fish stocks have largely dropped below sustainable, global warming has reached the dreaded feedback point where carbon sinks start releasing carbon without human intervention and we can't sustain half the world's population without GM crops.
Then let them starve. It doesn't take nearly as much to sustain a population of 2 billion as it does to sustain a population of 7 billion. Long term, we probably need to get down to about half that (1 billion) and keep it there through strict monitoring and eugenics. If we don't, well, at that point, we're extinct so I guess it doesn't really matter.
How would you find the best 20%? Geniuses don't arise from particular social groups or backgrounds.
Not actually true, as IQ distributions will show you.
nor are those who score best on IQ tests.
Of course they are. Intelligence is the single most important factor (though you would want to screen out people with serious congenital physical or mental health problems) in human survival.
The actually skilled people reside in the lower socio-economic groups and the knowledgeable in the higher.
The intelligent can become skilled, the stupid will never be be knowledgeable. That's what education is for
I understand you have a certain disdain for the people at the bottom, but without them you couldn't survive.
Sure I could, I already grow or hunt about half of what I personally eat, and could manage the rest easily if the need arose.
The Enlightenment'll only be dead when the majority of the west doesn't confuse its fundamental philosophies for timeless virtues.
The Enlightenment is already dead among those that matter. Whe cares what the peons in flyover country believe?
Anyway, I thought National Socialists were keen on Nietzsche. You're letting your side down.
It's an analogy, not a statement of faith.
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