If Rubio were to be elected, as unlikely as that seems now, he would be only the second reputed president not born to parents who were citizens when he was born, after Obama. Chester Arthur, Garfield’s vice president, was born to an Irish father, but Chester managed to keep that fact hidden, using such means as having his personal papers burned, having a confederate suggest that he might have been born in Canada or Ireland. All the attention was directed toward where he was born, not, in his case, Kenya, while he always had and concealed his birth records from Vermont.
But Rubio’s comment, which I haven’t seen in its entirety, has some merit. I know, from major graduate programs in mathematics, statistics and probability, and physics, that admitted foreign students are from one to two years ahead of U.S.0 educated students. They do their graduate work at our both public institutions, and at our heavily tax-subsidized private schools such as Stanford, Cal Tech, and MIT, Princeton, Harvard, and then face a struggle to find a corporate sponsor so that they might stay in the U.S.
A remarkable population economist, Julian Simon wrote a controversial book, The Ultimate Resource, which so stirred up the Marxists at Berkeley and Stanford including Obama Science Advisor John Holdren, the perennially wrong Zero Growth Paul Ehrlich and his ACLU wife, and several other of their comrades from Berkeley. Cutting to the chase, there is no depletion of resources. Humans and our brains have found economic substitutes for such limited resources as whale oil. Keeping the best educated in the U.S., particularly while we still have enough advantages in personal freedoms to attract them, is simply to our advantage.
Our politicians, from both parties, see illegal immigrants as the formula to guarantee jobs for social service employees, and possibly as increased vote counts, if you believe our auditable vote tabulations as relevant. (More concerning is that the implied increase in the number of citizens will swing the electoral college representations, an even less visible insult to representative government.)
Take a look sometime at the names of the U.S. Students chosen by performance on a spectacularly difficult test for the International Math Olympiad, or its collegiate equivalent The Putnam. Last I looked the Olympiad was 80% foreign students, mostly East Asian and Indian. I want to keep those families, most of whose parents came here for graduate work or on work visas, here contributing their brilliance to our nation’s wealth - our Ultimate Resource.
One of a few suggestions not implemented by our framers from their blueprint for a law-based republic rather than a monarchy, Emmerich de-Vattel’s Nature’s Law and The Law of Ntions, was the suggestion that citizens could not renounce their citizenship if they played a role critical to the health of the Nation. Castro’s Cuba did not allow nor did the USSR renunciation of citizenship without permission. (I don’t know about Russia). But keeping the brightest by making immigration easy for those declaring sole allegiance to our republic is very different than permitting the anchor babies of parents, some of whom seek our destruction, as did Obama’s father. To stay and be supported by our taxes through social services is very different. We would be best served by offering tax incentives to the most talented rather than forcing towns to absorb the 70-80% Muslim males of military age being housed in hotels at our expense.
If Rubio is referring to the senior managers in Silicon Valley, perhaps he is misinterpreting their concerns, which are many, but include the reality that they can’t afford the salaries the most talented engineers require just to live in California. Getting the most talented young engineers might help them survive here, but many of those engineers are finding the paper barriers not worth fighting. I think Rubio may have been taken out of context?
Require? Or want? Maybe Silicon Valley should move to, say, the Tennessee Valley.