Replies

"Absolutely wrong. We have the talent. Even now, most of the technology which dominates our society was developed without the aid of Chinese scientists."

Sorry, but you clearly have no idea what you're talking about, and are obviously not personally involved in Science and Engineering.

Without the importation of foreign students (Chinese, or otherwise) the Graduate level Engineering and Science programs of the majority of U.S. Universities would implode. Are there Americans with the talent to do the work? Sure. But they're also smart enough to know that there are better, more-lucrative careers in Law and Business, and that's where they go.

"I believe judeo-christian science will remain pre-eminent no matter how many multiples of non-judeo-christian scientists there may be. (yes, religion and culture is very definitely a factor in science.)"

Well, it's a free country, and you're welcome to believe whatever you want. On the other hand, there are a lot of top researchers from India, Japan, and S. Korea who can refute that statement. The laws of physics don't care about somebody's religion or race, and neither should we.

The US university system is far too open if the goal is to stop espionage at the research level. While I think that the US has left itself open to all kinds of hanky panky in the research departments (Los Alamos comes to mind first), the only way to effectively weed out potential spies would require completely shutting out Asian grad students.

As you point out this would be a complete disaster for American universities. Apparently, most of the posters decrying these "foreigners" haven't bothered looking at the names attached to many patents and scientific papers filed by universities over the past two decades. Imagine their shock if they went to some of these schools and found the huge number of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Korean and even African immigrants actually running entire departmetns or research facilities.

That said the passing of some of these technologies to countries whose interests are adverse (putting it politely) to ours, is sometimes nothing short of treason. We aren't in the Cold War right now, but maybe a few grad students should be reminded of what happened to the Rosenbergs.