But what we are doing, with this importation of the best and brightest from foreign sources, we are starving these other countries, essentially subjecting them to a “brain drain”. Exactly the point to these 'open border' types and especially the politicians who make dumb-assed statements like "We should staple a green card to the diploma of every foreigner who graduates from an American University". Yes, a prominent GOP Senator actually said this. I won't name the Senator because all but a relative handful of them agree with the statement.
It is a stupid idea for at least three reasons:
- Not every college degree is identical. We may have a shortage of nurses (and even that's arguable), but we certainly have a surplus of activist lawyers.
- Many of these foreign students were financed by their own governments or other such entities with the express understanding that they would come home and utilize their education to develop their own country. While the temptation of continuing life in America is strong, we should not be encouraging them to abrogate their original agreement and purpose they were given the opportunity to study here.
- Immigration policy should be based, first and foremost, on what type of people America needs; not on what would be desirable to a particular individual. Roughly 80% of the world's population would like to come here if they could. We have only 4% of the world's land area and 4% of the world's population. The problem is best solved by inspiring individuals to create a traditional American economic opportunity model in the home countries. Such model has been wildly successful everywhere it has been tried-- Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Chile, Panama, Columbia and, more recently, even some of the countries in the former Soviet satellite states.