This is a bit regrettably Friedmanish of me, but last night I wound up randomly meeting a young South Korean guy at a bar who’s in Stockholm as an exchange student and I asked him why he wanted to come to Sweden. He said Swedish people speak English very well and he wanted to improve his language skills. So I asked why he didn’t come to America where we speak better English than the Swedes (no offense) and don’t share Sweden’s perverse aversion to spicy food. He said it was too hard to get a visa to study in the USA.
You hear more and more stories like this in recent years and it’s just very hard for me to see the percentage in adopting visa policies that deter young, educated Asians from coming to the United States. From the very beginning our country has always derived powerful benefits from “brain drain” effects in which a healthy proportion of smart people from all around the world want to come here. There’s no good reason to throw that away.
Previous in TP Yglesias
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.