#CATO Institute

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The murder of Laken Riley took center stage during Thursday night's State of The Union. Riley was a 22-year-old student who was killed last month at the University of Georgia. The suspect in her murder is a Venezuelan migrant whom officials say was illegally in the U.S.

During the Republican rebuttal, Riley's murder was brought up by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt. "She was brutally murdered by one of the millions of illegal border crossers President Biden chose to release into our homeland. Y'all ... as a mom, I can't quit thinking about this. I mean, this could have been my daughter. This could have been yours."

The claim that immigration brings on a crime wave can be traced back to the first immigrants who arrived in the U.S. Ever since the 1980s and '90s, this false narrative saw a resurgence.

During the current presidential campaign, the vitriol has been intense. Just in the last few months, former president Donald Trump has spoken of immigrants as criminals and mentally ill people who are "poisoning the blood of our country". Florida Gov. (and former presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis suggested migrants crossing the border be shot.

However, research indicates that immigrants commit less crimes than U.S.-born people.

Much of the available data focuses on incarceration rates because that's where immigration status is recorded.

Some of the most extensive research comes from Stanford University. Economist Ran Abramitzky found that since the 1960s, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born people.

There is also state level research, that shows similar results: researchers at the CATO Institute, a Libertarian think tank, looked into Texas in 2019. They found that undocumented immigrants were 37.1% less likely to be convicted of a crime.

Beyond incarceration rates, research also shows that there is no correlation between undocumented people and a rise in crime. Recent investigations by The New York Times and The Marshall Project found that between 2007 and 2016, there was no link between undocumented immigrants and a rise in violent or property crime in those communities.

The reason for this gap in criminal behavior might have to do with stability and achievement. The Stanford study concludes that first-generation male immigrants traditionally do better than U.S-.born men who didn't finish high school, which is the group most likely to be incarcerated in the U.S.

The study also suggests that there's a real fear of getting in trouble and being deported within immigrant communities. Far from engaging in criminal activities, immigrants mostly don't want to rock the boat.

But the idea that immigrants bring crime remains widespread.

A few months ago, NPR reported on a migrant shelter functioning in Staten Island, N.Y. Anthony Pagano, the owner of a flower shop located close to the shelter, told NPR he was against it being located in his community.

"How do you put migrants across from an elementary school? An all-girl high school, and another public elementary school," he asked. "You don't know who they are. Criminals. You see all the crimes that are being committed by migrants."

New York City Police data shows there was no rise in murder, rapes or robberies in the area.

[ridenwithbiden]

ICYMI or forgot about the #RightWing owner of #CNN.

"The leading shareholder in Warner Brothers Discovery is John Malone, a multibillionaire cable magnate.

Malone describes himself as a “libertarian” although he travels in rightwing Republican circles. In 2005, he held 32% of the shares of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. He is on the board of directors of the Cato Institute. In 2017, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration.

Malone has said he wants CNN to be more like Fox News because, in his view, Fox News has “actual journalism”. Malone also wants the “news” portion of CNN to be “more centrist”.

*He's also the largest individual land owner in the country.*

IT WAS A SET UP

for trump

[charyou-tree]

Unfriendly reminder that CNN was recently bought out by rightwing billionaire John Malone, a board member of the far-right "libertarian think tank" called the Cato Institute, where he rubs elbows with other evil bastards like the Koch brothers.

From their wikipedia page:

Cato scholars have consistently called for the privatization of many government services and institutions,[77] including NASA,[78] Social Security,[79] the United States Postal Service,[80] the Transportation Security Administration,[81] public schooling, public transportation systems,[82][83] and public broadcasting.[84] The institute opposes minimum wage laws, saying that they violate the freedom of contract and thus private property rights, and increase unemployment.[85][86] The institute is opposed to expanding overtime regulations, arguing that it will benefit some employees in the short term, while costing jobs or lowering wages of others, and have no meaningful long-term impact.[87][88] It opposes child labor prohibitions,[89][90][91] opposes public sector unions, and supports right-to-work laws.[92][93] It opposes universal health care, arguing that it is harmful to patients and an intrusion onto individual liberty.[94][95] It is against affirmative action.[96] It has also called for total abolition of the welfare state, and has argued that it should be replaced with reduced business regulations to create more jobs, and argues that private charities are fully capable of replacing it.[97][98] Cato has also opposed antitrust laws.[99][100] Cato is an opponent of campaign finance reform, arguing that government is the ultimate form of potential corruption and that such laws undermine democracy by undermining competitive elections. Cato also supports the repeal of the Federal Election Campaign Act.[101][102]

They're for pretty much every horrible far-right policy there is. This man is a board member of the organization that was created for billionaire oligarchs to funnel money into bribing politicians and spreading propaganda to influence public opinion on regulations to try and make this vision of America a reality.

One of the best lies by Fox News that everyone swallowed uncritically is the idea that everyone else is "The Liberal Media".

CNN should be regarded as a fascist propaganda outlet for the indefinite future.

[midatlanticwasp]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Bier for The UnPopulist:

In a free society, markets incentivize people to contribute to the welfare of others through their work, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Thanks to freedom, America isn’t a fixed pie—it’s a growing pie. It is exactly for these reasons that so many people from around the world come to the United States, and it is exactly for those same reasons that we should let them come legally.

Immigrants Can Save America from Demographic Decline

The United States desperately needs more workers. Currently, the U.S. population is growing slower than at any point in its history. From 2020 to 2023, international migration was responsible for 73% of the meager 1% population growth during those three years. Without immigration, the U.S. population will start to decline by the 2030s. Already, about 40% of the counties in the United States saw declining populations in 2023. People are necessary to maintain buildings, roads, schools, hospitals, and businesses because population decline erodes property values and forces business and school closures. This population death spiral has afflicted both urban and rural counties. In fact, over the last decade, rural America lost population for the first time in U.S. history. By 2030, population aging or decline will reduce tax revenue per capita in nearly every state. The country has already seen how population decline will manifest in the future. Major cities saw significant out-migration in the 1960s and 1970s before they stabilized and rebounded in the 1990s and 2000s, in major part thanks to new immigrants. The out-migration led to housing vacancies and job losses, which contributed to increased crime, and the subsequent in-migration went hand in hand with lower crime and more business creation.

Immigrants Can Save America from Labor Force Decline

Along with slower population growth, labor force growth in the United States has also declined for decades, falling by 65% from the levels observed in the 1960s—a period when the immigrant share of the U.S. population bottomed out—to the most recent decade. This decline in labor force growth was even more pronounced among individuals without a college degree. These declines happened despite immigration. From 1995 to 2022, immigrants and their children accounted for 70% of labor force growth. There are jobs available for immigrants to fill. Currently, U.S. nonfarm employers have about 8.5 million open jobs. Every single month after January 2021 had more job openings than any month before it, back to the start of the job openings data series in the year 2000. Filling these open jobs could have increased U.S. Gross Domestic Product by over $2.5 trillion. Going forward, these unfilled job openings will cost the U.S. economy over half a trillion dollars per year. These jobs will not be filled without immigrants, as the U.S. prime-age employment rate is at a near-record high. With more Americans retiring than entering the labor force, immigrants have accounted for 100% of U.S. labor force growth since December 2019. Without immigrants, the working-age population will fall by about 6 million over the next two decades. We should not be concerned that immigrants will arrive and choose not to work, either. Immigrants will work if the government allows them to. Despite numerous legal obstacles to finding jobs in the United States, immigrants are more likely to work than U.S.-born workers overall and at every education level—a difference that grows significantly among the least skilled. Immigrant adults without high school degrees are about 20 percentage points more likely to work than comparable U.S.-born adults. Furthermore, nearly 97% of immigrants who looked for jobs in 2022 found them.

[...]

Immigration Can Help Prolong the Life of Social Security

Since the 1960s, the ratio of workers to retirees has plummeted, and the Social Security Trustees now estimate that Social Security will be short nearly 35 million workers to fund the system in the 2030s. It will have to cut benefits by at least 23% in 2034, if not earlier, or raise taxes to cover the shortfall. The situation will not improve in the future, with benefit cuts reaching 30% and the shortfall in workers hitting 80 million by 2080. According to the Social Security Administration Trustees 2022 report, increasing net immigration from 829,000 to nearly 1.7 million per year would reduce the annual burden of Social Security in 2097 by 1.5% of taxable payroll (the equivalent of $137 billion in 2022). This immigration range is based on what Social Security Trustees think might be possible given the current law, but 1.7 million immigrants per year are not significant as a percentage of the U.S. population compared to the level of immigration in many other countries. If immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren added the necessary 80 million additional workers by 2080, the savings would amount to $455 billion per year in 2080.

[...]

America’s Ill-Conceived Immigration System

The United States is benefiting from immigration despite its outdated and dysfunctional immigration system. Congress has not updated this system in over three decades. The main permanent immigration options available for immigrants abroad are:

The Refugee Program: The global population of displaced people reached 114 million in 2023, and the United States accepted barely 60,000 through its refugee program—a mere 0.05%.

Family‐​Sponsored Immigration: The capped family‐​sponsored system currently has a backlog of over 8.3 million, and alarmingly, 1.6 million of these applicants currently waiting will likely be dead before they can receive a green card.

Employer‐​Sponsored Immigration: Annually capped at just 140,000 green cards, this category currently has a backlog of over 1.8 million. The country‐​based caps mean that wait times for Indian workers with a master’s degree will be longer than the average person’s lifespan. Employer-sponsored green cards are close to impossible to obtain for those without very high wage offers and a work visa, and the main work visa—the H1B—is capped at 25% of demand. For those coming temporarily, the H2B seasonal worker program for nonagricultural jobs is the only path for most U.S. seasonal low‐​skilled jobs, and it has an annual cap of 66,000. Although Congress temporarily doubled this cap this year, that level was only about half the level required to meet the number of positions requested.

The Diversity Lottery: The diversity green card lottery is available to immigrants only if they are not from legal immigrants’ main origin countries and have a high-school degree or experience in a skilled job, and it offers entrants just a 0.2% chance of receiving a green card.

In 2023, about 34 million people entered a legal process to try to obtain a green card, yet barely more than 1 million will succeed and receive legal permanent residence—just 3% of applicants.

David Bier wrote in The UnPopulist that America will be in great harm if it doesn’t permit more legal immigration.

[thenewdemocratus]

Dan Mitchell: "Notwithstanding My WSJ Quiz Results, I Am Not a Conservative'

Source:CATO Institute fellow Daniel J. Mitchell. “Some online quizzes and tests about policy and philosophy produce very accurate results. I’m a “hard-core libertarian” according to Professor Bryan Caplan’s 130-question quiz. I’m “not communist” on a test to determine Marxist sympathies. I’m a “minimalist” according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s fiscal quiz. Some tests,…

[lg5]

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/C7NWczis9o4/?igsh=YWNvZmF4YW41N200

[adribosch-fan]

Mensaje para los cruzados judiciales de Brasil: La censura en nombre de la democracia sigue siendo una amenaza a la democracia

David Inserra sostiene que la supresión generalizada de la libertad de expresión bajo el pretexto de proteger la democracia, la sociedad o el gobierno va de la mano del aumento del autoritarismo, los abusos gubernamentales y el sufrimiento humano. Por David Inserra En las últimas semanas, un conflicto latente sobre las prácticas de censura de los tribunales brasileños ha estallado en conflicto…

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jeffrey A. Singer and Erec Smith

Published: Apr 7, 2024

Viewing patients not as individuals but as members of a group is hazardous not only to individuals’ health but also to society’s health.

In 2019, Stanley Goldfarb, the former associate dean of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, wrote an article lamenting the change in his institution’s mission from training future doctors to treat every patient equally and nonjudgmentally to prioritizing “social justice.” In January, a Wall Street Journal editorial reported that students at the University of California School of Medicine are now required to take a course on “structural racism,” which segregates them by race, requiring them to withdraw to different areas and discuss anti-racist prompts. That same month, Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard University Medical School, wrote a lengthy essay bemoaning the school’s curriculum changes. “In a rush to embed vague, contestable, and potentially harmful versions of social justice into medical education, we risk compromising the very foundation of medical training, and ultimately, patient care,” he concluded.

On March 19, Representative Greg Murphy, (R., N.C.), a medical doctor, introduced the Embracing anti-Discrimination, Unbiased Curricula, and Advancing Truth in Education (EDUCATE) Act. The bill would cut off federal funding for medical schools that force students and faculty to adopt specific beliefs, take loyalty oaths, or discriminate against students or patients by implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) classes in their curricula.

Contemporary DEI is undergirded by a divisive and illiberal ideology known, generally, as critical social justice. This form of scholarly activism rests on several tenets that ultimately denote the idea that Western civilization is systemically racist and that society can be split into two groups: the oppressors (i.e., white people) and the oppressed (non-white people). This ideology, which many have called “cultural Marxism,” blames all of society’s ills on “whiteness,” a veiled term for capitalism and tenets of classical liberalism. It values group consciousness over individual sovereignty, lived experience over the scientific method, and cancellation over civil discourse.

Can such an ideology coexist with science-driven medical education? As one may glean from these tenets of anti-racist education, which represent the pedagogical application of critical social justice, the answer is a clear “No.” In an essay juxtaposing “liberal” social justice and critical social justice, Michael Mills, co-founder of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science, explained, “When social justice comes up for discussion, the first question that should be posed is: ‘What type of social justice are you referring to — liberal or critical?’” Sadly, the DEI we see in medical schools and beyond aligns with the latter.

These days, medical schools include DEI training as part of the curriculum. DEI even infects continuing-education classes that physicians must take to maintain certification in a specialty. A recent “maintenance of certification” course for board-certified general surgeons focused on differentiating microaggressions from macroaggressions — nothing about diagnosing or treating surgical problems. How does this keep a surgeon current on the latest advances in managing surgical diseases?

One of us is a general surgeon. On more than one occasion, he performed emergency, life-saving surgery on victims of gang-related gun violence who were sporting swastikas and “white power” and antisemitic-slogan tattoos. Marinated in the ethos of pre-DEI medical training, he did not allow the patients’ tattoos or criminal backgrounds to let him lose focus on the sole mission: saving their lives. Law enforcement and the courts addressed the circumstances surrounding the injuries later.

Medical school is the place to learn anatomy and physiology and how to diagnose and treat human diseases and injuries. It is not the place to learn to judge people as oppressors or the oppressed or to prioritize treatment based on a hierarchy of victimhood. It is not supposed to teach doctors to decide who gets a kidney transplant based on whether a patient belongs to a historically disadvantaged group. It betrays the medical profession’s noble mission to consider one patient more righteous and deserving of treatment than another and to prioritize treatment based on anything other than its degree of urgency.

We are not saying that the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion per se do not have a place in the field of medicine; these concepts, as commonly understood outside the DEI regime, can be virtues in a free and pluralistic society. However, two significant caveats must be acknowledged.

First, education in DEI efforts need not take valuable time from education in the practice of medicine. In fact, moral and ethical issues regarding physicians and patients are already addressed in the burgeoning and separate field of medical humanities, an interdisciplinary field focused on the confluence of health, medicine, and life experiences from the perspective of humanistic disciplines such as philosophy, history, literature, religion, sociology, and anthropology.

For example, Stanford Medicine’s Presence initiative “champions the human experience in medicine” with the belief that “being present is integral to the art and the science of medicine and predicates the quality of medical care.” Concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion seem implicit in the medical humanities as they are commonly understood, which strongly suggests that the creation of separate DEI programs is superfluous and a misuse of time and resources.

What’s more, some schools, like the University of Texas’s Institute for Bioethics and Health Humanities, offer separate certificates in medical humanities for interested medical students. The key aspects of these programs are that they are voluntary and separate from education in the actual practice of medicine. Medical humanities as a field may be an important endeavor, but compelling medical-school students to take substantial time away from medical education to take part in such an endeavor is impractical and unwise.

The second caveat is that even if the field of medical humanities remains separate and distinct, DEI initiatives must still be done in ways that are not divisive and decidedly illiberal. That is, it cannot be undergirded by critical social justice. Unfortunately, some medical-humanities programs may be doing just that. For example, the Health Humanities Consortium seeks to educate both health professionals and the general public on “the experiences of patients, caregivers, and communities as they are shaped in relation to models of disease, illness, health, and wellness.”

This is a noble endeavor. However, the consortium’s statements on justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (JEDIB) smack of critical social justice, as can be gleaned from its strategic plan. Although the exact ways JEDIB is implemented pedagogically is not clear from the website, its emphasis on systemic racism as an uncontestable fact, as well as concepts of lived experience and epistemic justice, should be red flags to anyone familiar with critical social justice ideology.

DEI training’s pernicious effects on clinicians extend beyond treating physical conditions. Its impact on how clinicians treat people with mental-health problems is bone-chilling. The American Psychological Association recently released its new Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men based on the premise that “traditional masculinity is . . . on the whole harmful.” It encourages psychotherapists working with boys and men to “address issues of privilege and power related to sexism.”

Writing in the Spectator, noted academic psychiatrist Sally Satel decries the new “social justice therapy” for its “total disregard for the patient’s agency, assuming that social forces are the singularly important determinant of their problems.” Why in the world should anyone seek help from a mental-health professional who regards them as inherently flawed because of biologically determined characteristics?

One of liberalism’s great insights is that every person is a unique, autonomous individual. Health professionals have an ugly record of betraying that understanding. The German medical profession embraced Nazi racial ideology during the Third Reich when performing euthanasia and live human experiments on members of “racially inferior” groups. Closer to home, American public-health officials’ implicit belief that members of some racial groups had less individual worth than others was behind the infamous Tuskegee experiment with untreated syphilis.

Viewing patients not as individuals but as members of a group is hazardous not only to individuals’ health but also to society’s health. It can lead to bad outcomes.

Jeffrey A. Singer practices general surgery in Phoenix, Ariz., and is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Erec Smith is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and an associate professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania.

[ Via: https://archive.today/gPcZZ ]

[rodgermalcolmmitchell]

There goes the last Republican talking point.

Donald Trump’s accomplishments in office pale compared to Biden’s three years. Despite fighting Republicans, who have been devoted to stopping anything the Democrats propose, Biden has had a remarkably good term. SIGNIFICANT BILLS BIDEN HAS PASSED IN 3+ YEARS 1. American Rescue Plan Act: A $1.9 trillion stimulus package aimed at addressing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes…

[sinoeurovoices]

2023年人類自由指數報告：台灣位居第12亞洲最高 中國位居149位

美國智庫卡托研究所（Cato Institute）和加拿大菲沙研究所（Fraser Institute）19日發布2023年度人類自由指數（Human Freedom Index,…

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) filed a lawsuit Friday against the Biden administration’s new student loan income-driven repayment (IDR) plan.

The lawsuit comes after the Department of Education launched a beta website this week for the Saving on Valuable Education (SAVE) application, the new IDR plan the White House has dubbed the “most generous” for student borrowers.

The NCLA, on behalf of the Cato Institute and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, filed a suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan to stop the implementation of this plan.

The NCLA is arguing that the new IDR plan violates the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause, which allows Congress to be in charge of what debt owed to the Treasury can be canceled.

Under the SAVE plan, loan forgiveness would come quicker for many borrowers. For one, the plan allows borrower whose student loan has an original principal balance of $12,000 or less to get forgiveness after 10 years of payments.

It also allows certain periods of deferment and forbearance to count toward the time needed to get full forgiveness on an individual’s loan.

“In the Nebraska case, the Supreme Court struck down the Department of Education’s brazen attempt to pull a billion-dollar ‘elephant’ out of a statutory ‘mousehole.’ This time the Department’s loan-cancellation scheme does not even pretend to have a statutory ‘mousehole,'” said Sheng Li, Litigation Counsel for NCLA.

“The [Public Service Loan Forgiveness] and IDR statutes require borrowers to make a certain number of monthly payments before earning forgiveness. By trying to count non-payments as payments, the strategy seems to be to cancel $39 billion faster than a court can review and stop this blatantly unlawful act,” Li continued.

Along with the $39 billion the NCLA says the Department could cancel almost immediately, it would allow debt to be canceled for 2.8 million more IDR borrowers in the future.

“Instead of promulgating the plan through the required notice-and-comment and negotiated rulemaking process under the Administrative Procedure Act, the Department simply issued a press release that did not identify any laws to justify it,” the NCLA wrote.

The challenge to the SAVE plan comes two months before student loan borrowers will be forced back into repayment after the three-year COVID-19 student loan pause.

The Hill has reached out to the Department of Education for comment.

[empiricalscotus]

Two Pieces to the Puzzle: Long Conference Petitions and Granted Cases for OT 2023

[completed with the help of Jake Truscott who gathered data for this post] The 2022 Supreme Court term concluded this past June. Since then, the Justices have been on break. In the past several justices go on vacation (some of the downsides to such travel have been documented as well) while others teach in exciting locations in and outside of the U.S.  This summer it appears that the justices…

[lordrakim]

Child Labor in America Is Back—and It’s As Chilling as Ever

It should be a reminder of how deeply retrogressive capitalism has once again become both here at home and elsewhere across the planet.   Continue reading Untitled

[xtruss]

Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States! Here’s Why That Spells Bad News For Washington.

— By Christina Lu and Anusha Rathi | July 13, 2023 | Foreign Policy

A view of Building 10 on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States on March 12, 2020. Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

Facing an increasingly suspicious research climate, a growing number of Chinese scientists are leaving the United States for positions abroad, the latest indicator of how worsening U.S.-China relations are complicating academic collaboration and could hamstring Washington’s tech ambitions.

Chinese scientists living in the United States have for decades contributed to research efforts driving developments in advanced technology and science. But a growing number of them may now be looking elsewhere for work, as deteriorating geopolitical relations fuel extra scrutiny of Chinese researchers and Beijing ramps up efforts to recruit and retain talent. Between 2010 and 2021, the number of Chinese scientists leaving the United States has steadily increased, according to new research published last month. If the trend continues, experts warn that the brain drain could deal a major blow to U.S. research efforts in the long run.

“It’s absolutely devastating,” said David Bier, the associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “So many of the researchers that the United States depends on in [the] advanced technology field are from China, or are foreign students, and this phenomenon is certainly going to negatively impact U.S. firms and U.S. research going forward.”

From semiconductor chips to artificial intelligence, technology has been at the forefront of U.S.-China competition, with both Washington and Beijing maneuvering to strangle each other’s sectors. Cooperation, even in key sectors like combating climate change, has been rare.

From 2010 to 2021, the number of scientists of Chinese descent who left the United States for another country has surged from 900 to 2,621, with scientists leaving at an expedited rate between 2018 and 2021, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Nearly half of this group moved to China and Hong Kong in 2010, the study said, and a growing percentage of Chinese scientists have relocated to China over the years.

While this number represents a small fraction of the Chinese scientists in the United States, the uptick reflects researchers’ growing concerns and broader apprehension amid a tense geopolitical climate. After surveying 1,304 Chinese American researchers, the report found that 89 percent of respondents wanted to contribute to U.S. science and technology leadership. Yet 72 percent also reported feeling unsafe as researchers in the United States, while 61 percent had previously considered seeking opportunities outside of the country.

“Scientists of Chinese descent in the United States now face higher incentives to leave the United States and lower incentives to apply for federal grants,” the report said. There are “general feelings of fear and anxiety that lead them to consider leaving the United States and/or stop applying for federal grants.”

The incentives to leave are twofold. Beijing has funneled resources into research and development programs and has long attempted to recruit scientists, even its own, from around the world. For one of its initiatives, the Thousand Talents Plan, Beijing harnessed at least 600 recruitment stations worldwide to acquire new talent. “China has been really trying to lure back scientists for a long time,” said Eric Fish, the author of China’s Millennials.

But this latest outflow of Chinese scientists accelerated in 2018, the same year that then-U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled the China Initiative, a controversial program that was aimed at countering IP theft—and cast a chill over researchers of Chinese descent and collaborations with Chinese institutions. In 2020, he also issued a proclamation denying visas for graduate students and researchers affiliated with Chinese universities associated with the military.

Although the Biden administration shut down the China Initiative, experts warn that its shadow still looms over Chinese scientists. More than one-third of respondents in the PNAS survey reported feeling unwelcome in the United States, while nearly two-thirds expressed concerns about research collaboration with China.

“There is this chilling effect that we’re still witnessing now, where there is a stigma attached to collaboration with China,” said Jenny Lee, a professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona.

The challenges are emblematic of how the breakdown in U.S.-China relations has thrown universities into a geopolitical firestorm, particularly as some states’ lawmakers pressure them to sever ties with Chinese counterparts. On the U.S. side, interest in Mandarin language studies and study abroad has plummeted over the years, largely the result of worsening ties, Beijing’s growing repression, and the coronavirus pandemic. Today, while there are roughly 300,000 Chinese students in America, only 350 Americans studied in China in the most recent academic year. If interest continues to recede, experts warn of spillover effects that could hamper Washington’s understanding of Beijing.

“We’re losing a generation of people who are knowledgeable about China,” said Daniel Murphy, the former director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. “I’m concerned that the United States is going about this issue in a way that excessively focuses on risks of the academic relationship, without due consideration for the benefits. And I think we see this in a whole host of arenas, and that it’s bipartisan.”

At the same time as a growing number of Chinese scientists exit the United States, new students appear to be facing higher barriers to entry as student visa denials and backlogs reach record high levels. According to a blog post by the Cato Institute, student visa denials peaked at about 35 percent in 2022—the highest rate recorded in two decades.

Student visa denial data is not available by nationality, but Bier, the Cato Institute expert who wrote the piece, said that there is a high degree of correlation between denial rates for B-visas, or tourist visas, and student visas. “Having reviewed the B-visa denials in China, it’s pretty clear that the Chinese overall visa denial rate has increased significantly over the last few years and is at a level now where it’s the highest it’s been in decades,” he said.

Just as some Chinese scientists are looking abroad, these challenges are pushing a growing number of international students to turn elsewhere for academic opportunities. Students are increasingly heading to countries like Canada, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, all of which are opening their doors to high-skilled workers and researchers. To attract more talent, the United Kingdom has issued “Global Talent” and “High Potential Individual” visas, which allow scholars from top universities to work there for 2-3 years and 1-5 years, respectively.

Universities are being impacted “by geopolitical tensions, by political agendas, and so it’s certainly inhibiting U.S. Universities’ ability to attract the best and brightest,” Lee said.

— Christina Lu is a Reporter at Foreign Policy. Anusha Rathi is an Editorial Fellow at Foreign Policy.

[thenewdemocratus]

Washington Examiner: Stephen R. Smith: 'How to Make Retirement More Secure & Make Capitalism Work For All'

Source:Washington Examiner How about instead of justing giving big successful companies and corporations subsidies for being successful and wealthy, which is what corporate welfare is, we put that taxpayer money to good use. We convert corporate welfare into corporate workfare. That is taxpayers are going to subsidize American corporations at all, that money has to be spent in America and…