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Comment by Bratmon | Hacker News Reader

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It's unpopular because it's ignorant, uninformed, and actively harmful.

To add to the rest of the comments, accepting and enrolling international students in our university system confers enormous benefits to this country. We drain the best and brightest from the rest of the world to come here, participate in our economy, start businesses, make research breakthroughs, start a life here, and teach future generations.

This is unambiguously good. It does not come at a cost to Americans, but is an inarguable boon which serves as further fuel for our continued global economic dominance. Willingly sacrificing this advantage is so profoundly stupid and self-destructive it beggars belief.

Most Americans never visit another country (save for immediate neighbors) and so probably aren't aware that having paying foreign students at universities is very standard everywhere in the developed world.

> This is unambiguously good. It does not come at a cost to Americans, but is an inarguable boon which serves as further fuel for our continued global economic dominance.

Are you sure? China is doing the exact opposite and their country is developing explosively.

They aren’t zero sum and international students pay often 2-5x what American and in state students pay. So they are subsidizing things as well. maybe not too much (because international students make up a tiny part of any university) but still.

If you have evidence that international students (often grad school and higher) are actually taking spots away from natives then please provide evidence.

You want evidence that American universities are turning down Americans while accepting foreign students?

Okay: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-accepta...

This is bad news because it will severely diminish our many leading research universities. Perhaps, if the government intended to fund education to compensate for crippling these institutions, an argument could be made in favor. But the current government has the opposite priority and is actively suing and threatening universities.

This is only good news if you want to see the decline of the United States.

Is a foreign student who finishes the university and then stays in America an American?

Let’s look at an analogous situation: a middle-class Brit who buys a home in Spain to retire in. This Briton might speak the language fluently and spend the remaining 15-20 years of their life in Spain, paying taxes and contributing to the local economy. But their ability to pay top-of-market for housing comes at the expense of locals, who wind up petitioning the government to change visa rules to stem the tide of foreigners.

It’s not a simple situation when scarcity is involved, and it ultimately doesn’t matter what nationality you consider long-term immigrants to possess.

You mean like a Londoner retiring in the countryside? I really don't see the difference. Local is such a crazy concept, I mean, I totally get what you're getting at but you are using the wrong tools to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

A middle-class Brit who buys a home in Spain to retire in just got sold a property that was worth peanuts on the market not that long ago for a very large amount of money in the Spanish economy. Whoever sold it to them would have never sold it for the same amount of money to another person from the same location because we've embraced 'the market'. What you fail to touch on is that this Briton is importing not only their wealth, but also a lot of extra expenditure all of which benefits the local economy. The real burden is when they start leaning on the health care system, which wasn't made to cater to a bunch of aging foreigners and that will quickly turn the so-far net positive into a net negative, financially and service wise for everybody else.

Emigrating later in life to another - poorer - country is a burden on that poorer country that the immigrants did not pay into earlier in life. If you emigrate: do it when you're young enough to contribute to the system that you will rely on to support you when you're older. Otherwise you are just preying on the denizens of weaker economies (ok, they got the better deal with the weather). The housing market could be fixed, the economic disparity and subsequent service shortages can not, that money got left behind in the UK.

That's not analogous - analogous would be if the Brit bought a home in China or India, or perhaps Algeria.

Like so many other things, Americans don't pay for education as much as other countries do.

This shift has consequences for funding of schools that have not been completely simulated out yet. Prepare for unforeseen consequences.

It's not taboo, it's lowest common denominator demagoguery which overlooks that this is a mechanism to gain educated talent to become citizens even if those people do happen to be brown.

Recently a Haitian-American specialist solved in issue for me that several white doctors I'd seen had been unable to help. It's weird that I should have to cite an example of someone foreign-born being valuable to have here but this is 2025.

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