We should take in many more educated immigrants
Right and Left, rich and poor, everybody benefits from some more smart and driven foreign people
I think going to a prestigious college in America is a great way to become more conservative.1 The schools are run nearly entirely by liberals, and they are usually run quite poorly, hemorrhaging money on useless things like mandatory diversity trainings and an always-expanding corps of administrative career bureaucrats that didn’t exist in the 1980s and 90s when college was more fun and substantially cheaper. The liberals who run the prestigious colleges in America are also usually scolds, who frequently try to suck the fun out of the institutions, often under the guise of wildly exaggerated risks to personal safety, both physical and mental (the latter of which they are unconcerned by if it means hiring more therapists).
HOWEVER, there is also an aspect of going to a prestigious (or out-of-state) college in America that makes one substantially more liberal and open-minded. And that aspect is meeting all kinds of people you didn’t meet before. College may not make you a Marxist, but it does make you more likely to have your first gay friend, or your first black friend, or your first Southern friend, and I think that opens your mind up a lot and makes you less scared of people with different backgrounds.
And that’s what I want to write about today. I have met a large amount of international students at Dartmouth, and the vast majority of them will not live in America when they are older than 26ish, despite many of them wanting to, and I think that is really messed up. The immigration of intelligent and driven people into America is a really good thing for this country, and we should have more of it. It would be really good for the economy, and I also think it would be good at alleviating some of the cultural issues plaguing American elites.
What’s the current situation?
Currently, here are the basics: you can get a F-1 visa if you go to college in America, and then you can get an OPT visa for when you graduate, which lasts a year, or three if you are a STEM graduate.
If you didn’t get your degree in America, or if you want to stay past your OPT’s expiration, you need an H-1B, which lasts three more years and can be extended three more years after that. This system is mostly random, and your odds of obtaining an H-1B are about 23%.
Then after the H-1B expires, you need a green card. This is where it gets really complicated because of various different categories and country quotas. I don’t think anyone knows the exact rate of educated, employed people who get their green card applications accepted, in part because it depends on where you are from and whether you have family already here. For example, there are over a million Indians waiting their turn for green cards because India has hit its quota so many times so quickly.
There’s really an endless list of things you could learn about this process, but the basics are that there are significantly more educated immigrants that want to live here than are allowed to.
The economics of educated immigrants
The debate over the economics of immigration is truly never-ending, but the basic debate is about whether and in what direction immigrants change the wages of the native-born. This debate gets incredibly empirical incredibly quickly, but it all hinges on whether immigrants raise labor supply more than they raise labor demand.
To the extent that immigrants raise labor supply by wanting to work, this lowers wages because it’s more people competing for jobs. To the extent they also buy goods and services, which are made by workers, that increases demand for workers, which increases wages.
The answer is probably both, simultaneously, and I mostly like the academic work that stresses that immigration is clearly good for natives in some places and sectors and times while being bad in some other places and sectors and times.
But the immigration of the very-likely-to-be-successful is pretty much unambiguously good for the same Econ 101, supply-and-demand reasons that were previously discussed. A doctor who moves to America only affects the labor supply by one person (and doctor wages should probably be lower anyway), yet they have to spend all of their hundreds of thousands on goods and services that workers will be procuring. If you are gonna spend hundreds of thousands a year, and barely affect the labor supply in an industry where people are overpaid anyway, you’re doing an unambiguously great thing for our economy.
Foreign cultures are less plagued by our ills!
This is not my favorite reason for inviting more educated immigrants, but I do think there are legitimate complaints about how American elites operate, and that those complaints are way less true of immigrants.
Some of these complaints fall into the classic “wokeness” category, like when the public health world embarrassed itself by pushing for lockdowns, then doing a 180 when it came to specifically protests over police violence, but not anything else. In the same public health realm, there’s also when the CDC almost recommended we give vaccines on the basis of race, or when a few states actually did give out once-scarce Paxlovid on the basis of race.
And adjacent to this wokeness category, there is the story of California Prop 16 in 2020, the proposition to bring back affirmative action to California public hiring and public colleges. This proposition was defeated despite the Yes side raising 15 times more money and having the backing of every popular politician in the state. This happened in part because affirmative action is furiously unpopular, but also because the No side was led by an extremely shrewd and talented women who is a highly-educated Chinese immigrant.
There’s other complains about American elites that are just about how unrepresentative they are of the greater American populace. For example, American elites are significantly less religious than the rest of America.
American elites also have fewer kids.
American elites are also significantly less patriotic than the rest of the country.
And if you are a social conservative who wants to resolve these problems of the American elite (both wokeness and representativeness), I think it’d be a great idea to invite a bunch of educated or going-to-be-educated immigrants from more conservative countries around the world like China and India. Immigrants are more patriotic and they have more kids, and in my experience (since there’s no stats on this), they’re also way less woke.
So let’s do something everybody wants
So, I really do think we should let in a lot more educated immigrants, and I think this is something everyone can get behind. I think it’s safe to say that after 2016 and 2020, liberals have become the party of more immigration of all types. But one thing even Trump stressed was the value of high-skilled immigrants. And it’s not just Trump; according to Pew, even most people who think we should have less immigrants want to encourage high-skill immigration!
There is genuine disagreement among Americans about “low-skill” immigrants, or in nicer terms, immigrants who haven’t gotten a degree and won’t get one. But most people do want more “high-skill” immigrants, and I think we should give the people what they want. Everybody in America would benefit from more intelligent and driven people in our country.
There’s an idea on the right that colleges, especially prestigious ones, indoctrinate their students and turn them into liberals or even Marxists. This idea is just blatantly wrong from my experience, and the numbers back me up. Only 7.5% of Harvard’s class of 2024 identified as conservative when they were freshmen, and only 6.4% of Harvard’s class of 2022 identified as conservative when they graduated. It’s not that anyone’s being indoctrinated; it’s that the type of people who go to elite colleges are way more likely to be liberals in today’s political alignment. Historians are also really liberal for example, but it’s not a history PhD that makes you liberal. It’s just only liberals who choose to get history PhDs.