How to Lose the Brain Race

[heidler1]

How to Lose the Brain Race
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/10/opinion/10Clemons.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Published: April 10, 2006
Washington

IS the United States importing too many immigrant physicists and not enough immigrant farm workers? You might think so, to judge from two provisions that Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, added to the comprehensive immigration reform package that just fell apart in the Senate. Senator Feinstein insisted that the bill call for some fees for foreign students applying to study at American colleges and universities to be doubled, and also demanded that agribusiness get the right to 1.5 million low-wage foreign guest workers over five years. Combined, the two proposals sent a message to the rest of the world: send us your brawn, not your brains.



The United States can always use another Albert Einstein or Alexander Graham Bell. But with the vast pool of poorly paid, ill-educated laborers already within our borders, we do not need a third of a million new ones a year.

What the space race was to the cold war, the "brain race" is to today's peaceful global economic competition. The comprehensive immigration reform America needs is one that slashes unskilled immigration and creates a skill-rewarding points system modeled on those of Australia, Britain and Canada. In encouraging skilled labor, Congress for a change might perform some of its own.

[Selatius]

1. If the war on science continues, we'll lose more scientists than gain them

The last thing we want is to drive a future Einstein from the US for the fact that the federal government has made his research illegal or simply won't help fund his research.

[Warpy]

2. Einstein isn't going to university any more

If he's at all smart, he's going into a skilled trade like plumbing. He'll make a good living, open his own company, be his own boss, and have a chance at a comfortable retirement.

If he'd gone to university, he'd be saddled with a huge debt getting to the PhD level and find few jobs, none of which would pay a plumbing company owner's salary. Or he'd have to skip out on that debt and go overseas to find a job, never to return home. He'd spend his life in debt with no job security and his research would be curtailed or negated by whatever religious nut the GOP installed as his boss.

I find that incredibly sad. It took so long to build this country. It's only taken the religious wack jobs 26 years to destroy it.