Our growing “foreigner” paradox
The relentless campaign against U.S. residents who were born elsewhere continues to grow. It’s not just the aggressive ICE surges or Trump’s attempt to deport a sitting U.S. Congressperson: Moves against foreign-born students and young scientists have been particularly destructive. The administration has pushed for limits on the time non-U.S. doctoral students can stay here to work on their dissertations, and has tried to ban my own institution from accepting students from other countries. Nationally, promising trainees often see their visa applications routinely turned down on the first try; when our research group contemplates hiring foreign-born colleagues, we’re periodically warned that it could cost $100,000 to apply for each H-1-B visa for people with special technical skills. That may be the cost of doing business for IBM, but it’s a real problem for academic programs trying to hire smart post-docs.
So it was ironic amid all this xenophobia to see President Trump hand out medals recently to a group of tech giants: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (born in India); Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su (born in Taiwan); Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX (born in South Africa); Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (born in Taiwan); and Google co-Founder Sergey Brin (born in the USSR).
Even for someone with as little insight as he has, isn’t the craziness of this split screen awkward? If the policies Trump is implementing had been in place in the past, these honorees would have been kept out of the U.S.A…. as would hundreds of thousands of other smart, hard-working people who started companies, designed new inventions, or did front-line work taking care of some of our most vulnerable neighbors.
On the latter front, nursing homes and hospitals are reeling from the loss of Temporary Protected Status by over 300,000 Haitians, who can no longer be legally employed here – even though they formed the backbone care in these institutions. They will now have to return to their home country despite the fact that the State Department has issued a Level 4 warning for Americans (its highest), with the explanation: “Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.”
All of my grandparents and those of my wife were born in Eastern Europe; they came here to seek a better (and pogrom-free) life, and managed to do so. The faculty and students in my research program at Harvard hail from several dozen countries, a fact we announce proudly at international meetings.
But it’s not just about the gross violation of fairness here. The pharmaceutical/biotech industry increasingly expresses anguish that China is about to eat our lunch in the area of new drug development. That’s not a surprise: while more and more smart foreign-born scientists trying to launch their careers here are rebuffed by the Deporter-in-Chief, and worries grow about the reliability of research funding from NIH, these young people are welcomed by other countries, especially China. As the nexus of new drug developments shifts east, I guess the response here will be to call it “theft of intellectual property” and impose tariffs on the growing number of new medicines that will be developed beyond our shores.