I’m in Aspen for the Ideas Festival. I’ll write a daily note, updated now and then, on things that strike me as interesting.
One thing that already keeps coming up—in this environment rich in high-tech executives and entrepreneurs—is the unfathomable bone-headedness of a US immigration policy that discriminates against the skilled. Intel’s Craig Barrett railed against this at a session last night and University of Maryland’s Dan Mote picked the theme up again this morning. What other country, Dan asked, deports its freshly minted science PhDs? Every PhD should come with a green card attached, he said.
A session featuring Sean Wilentz on his new book about the Age of Reagan disappointed me. I wanted to know how a card-carrying liberal commentator came to conclude that Reagan was a great president. He dealt with this perfunctorily at the beginning—saying (a bit oddly, I thought) that he wrote the book as a historian, thus using only a part of his brain, and setting his prejudices to one side. Are we to conclude that he writes his political commentary with the other part of his brain, letting his prejudices rip and suppressing his sense of historical detachment and disinterestedness? Anyway, I came away with no sense at all of why he thought Reagan was a great president despite (on Wilentz’s view) being wrong about most things.
A session on “Where will the next technological breakthroughs come from?”, featuring the aforementioned Dan Mote, was valuable even though the panel ignored that interesting question entirely. The brilliant Danny Hillis (pioneer of parallel processing) described three levels of innovation: building blocks (lasers, microprocessors), products that bundle them together (iPods, etc), and adaptation to innovations of the second kind (think of the way the telephone transformed business and society). Intriguing to think of the third level as itself a kind of innovation. America has great strengths in this area of adaptation—a flexible and relatively lightly regulated economy, an ability to reinvent itself—but perhaps some weaknesses too, at least as compared with rising Asia. Installed infrastructure can make adaptation difficult. In some ways it helps to have a blank slate—the better to leapfrog a technology (think of the way rural India and Africa are moving directly from no phones to cellphones).
I found Danny Hillis' remarks interesting. America's great strengths do indeed exist in this "intriguing third level... itself a kind of innovation." The problem is that few people recognize the critical necessity we have to develop these strengths to maintain our position in the world and to solve strategic problems. We must automate our production. Mark Helprin makes this point recently in The Claremont Review of Books in a discussion of our vulnerability to China. (http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1549/article_detail.asp)
"...But instead of continuing to automate our production, which digitalization clearly makes possible, we have turned to entertainment. ("iPods, etc.") As we complain of industry moving offshore, we have put our culture in an electronic stupor—an anesthetic with which both to ensure and grow numb to defeat. But our understanding of information processing, sensing and measuring devices, artificial intelligence, nanotechnics, and materials science makes the automation of production a frontier we are exquisitely equipped to conquer. The pertinent question is not where is the outrage that we have not, but where is even the dim consciousness that we can and should? Who speaks of this in the presidential campaign? The candidates prefer, rather, though the answer is readily at hand, to whine and console."
Ha well if they were really smart they wouldn't have to worry about going back home, the only people (US masters or higher) with a wait time for an immigrant visa are EB-2 beneficiaries from India and Mainland China. This is due to the 7% nation cap, EB-1 benes are current and visas are immediately available.
This is also only for immigrant visas...H1Bs and other non-immigrant visas are another story... I am all for comprehensive reform, I just do not believe that most people who write about immigration really know how the system works...
"Are we to conclude that he writes his political commentary with the other part of his brain, letting his prejudices rip and suppressing his sense of historical detachment and disinterestedness?"
All you need to do is read him to know the answer is that he does.
So, Clive, are you ever going to admit that the logical corollary to admitting high human capital immigrants is keeping out low human capital illegal immigrants?