The issue most people have is that the program seems to be rampantly abused. Companies are replacing US workers with H1-B's sourced from companies like Tata and Infosys at much lower salaries than US employees would normally command. In some cases, they're just bringing in foreign workers for the time it takes to train them, then having them work remotely and paying them even less still.

Disney even made their US employees train their replacements before laying them off: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...

Southern California Edison was another company that did the same: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2879083/it-outsourcing...

It's this type of abuse where US companies are simply looking to fire US citizens so they can pay slave wages to foreign contractors for the same work that people are up in arms about.

This canard keeps getting repeated in HN threads. This is WRONG. 100% absolutely completely WRONG. The only stated purpose of the H-1B program is to allow foreigners with degrees (or equivalent experience) to perform skilled work in the US. Here are the DOL requirements: https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/elg/h1b.htm

The only one that affects US workers is to "[p]rovide working conditions for H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3 workers that will not adversely affect the working conditions of workers similarly employed." (There are additional requirements on H-1B dependent companies, but those don't apply to most companies.)

Here's a fact sheet from the DOL specifically about this matter: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62O...

What you're talking about is requirements for an EB-2 or EB-3 green card.

While it may not be the sole purposes as outlined in the link [0] you provided, it does mean that the rules state this very fact that precedence is to be given to US workers. So saying it's 100% wrong is... wrong as well.

[0] https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/elg/h1b.htm#who

https://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm

Seriously. Who in the world would consider being fired and replaced with cheap labor an adverse effect?

It's frustrating when people complain about H-1Bs at big companies like Google/MS/Amazon. Apparently we're underpaid, overworked, and stealing a job from an american. Despite the fact that these companies are almost constantly hiring and if the american wants to go try, they could.

That's in the short term. In the long term more Americans would do CS, and if the supply is tight enough, Apple and the others would open schools to train teenagers to code.

Not saying that the current system isn't better. But the basic forces are what they are.

Btw, you are underpaid and overworked. The game-room is gaming you to stay at work longer hours.

This is exactly correct. I'm a US citizen and work at a high paying tech job. Amazon calls me at least once a month to try to convince me to work for them. The problem is that their highest allowed salary is lower than what I'm already making, and I also get gobs of stock bonuses worth at least as much as their stock bonuses. So they really aren't even trying to compete here. If they really wanted people of my caliber who were US citizens, they'd have to improve their compensation.

More likely still, significantly more SaaS in easily configurable packages as companies that can't afford massive dev salaries for an IT department turn towards GoogMicroSAP to fulfill their needs

Not just taxes. They also pay for social security even though they don't get anything from it. If that is not enough, they also have to pay tax for the income they get in their parent country while they are in US. I get paying US taxes, but why pay tax for income that has nothing to do with US?

That's laughable unless you take the legalistic view that, unless it's been litigated not to be in good faith, that's good (faith) enough. Companies like Tata exist only to import cheaper workers. Saying otherwise amounts to claiming you might just want to hold hands with that person from the escort service.

It's also insulting to those who can see the difference between an R&D organization doing a worldwide search for a CTO and a "body shop."

The alternative of an H1B is not an American. It's off shoring the entire project to a team that doesn't live in the US in the first place.

Imagine if there was a law that required companies to post job openings for every position in the company, regardless of whether or not that position was already filled. As you can imagine, they would likely make the job requirements exceedingly specific for the roles filled by people they really like.

You don't even need to imagine, just go look at government or non-profit job postings. It's often the case that they similar ridiculous policies for promotions, where they already have a person they want to promote, but they need to open it up to public applicants first.

This is fairly obvious, but do Americans not realize this? Or are they consciously saying that its better for high paying jobs to move out of US than for foreigners to work at those jobs in US?

Nope, the alternative is off shoring the project to places like Ohio and Montana.

Being unable to import cheap labor from overseas would be a huge loss to these chop shops and allow other local companies to compete with local staff.

I assume the person writing the advertisement just forgot that they're technically looking for a local candidate.

IMO, a better law would be to give a green card with 3 yr validity to those on H1b. Then you'll see how the equation changes. Employees on H1b have very few choices due to these locks.

Sadly, good numbner of people are naive enough to not see past the fracas.

People born elsewhere (other than China, India, Philippines) and are here on an H1b, are better off in terms of chances of getting a Green Card and a citizenship in a decent amount of time.

Ethnicities/nationalities like Mexicans have negligible skilled EB immigrants and have a much higher reliance on FB to immigrate a whole family to the U.S. (oftentimes derisively called out by Republicans as chain immigration), and thus they face longer FB backlog compared with Chinese FBs and Indian FBs. For example, as of today, the backlog for an Unmarried Child of an Mexican immigrant is 21 years, whereas that of Indians and Chinese are 7. (https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/law-and-policy/bul...) The priority date for a skilled Mexican immigrant programmer, who would be filing for either EB2 or EB3, is current (no backlog).

Since the system is heavily family-oriented, EBs often found themselves in very awkward positions as either the scape-goat for America's economic problems or distractions among partisan fights. A lot of things do not make sense. For example, the spouse of an EB petitioner does not count as "family-based" but takes up one more EB slot, and their school-age children, despite not being employed for work, are counted as "employment-based" immigrants. In addition, to offset the number of green cards given out to Chinese nationals after the 1989 Tian'anmen Square Massacre, a number of greencards are deducted from Chinese EB quota. Just making small changes to these two issues can ompletely eliminate Chinese backlog and greatly shorten Indian backlog. However, the politicians couldn't care any less about sensible solutions. While Democrats typically only pay the lip service, Republicans' common tactic is to hide their anti-immigration attempt behind a big banner of pro-skilled immigrants. The Rs either will try to trade the EBs with zeroing out refugee quota or slashing FBs in half, for example. They may have a good point (U.S. admits more refugees than employment-based immigrants annually), but touching that hot-button issue will never get Democratic votes, and it beginning to increasingly look like Republicans' political show vote.

A point to be noted, is that the arbitrary per country cap for EB green cards, was added in the last 30 years, to surreptitiously add a subtle anti-Asian bias, to reduce the number of Chinese immigrants entering US. Looks like Indian and Philippine citizens are caught in the cross fire now.

If you speak to high skilled immigrants in US who understand the situation, you'll see them being equally highly frustrated with the Democrats and the Republicans, and their respective supporters. Everything seems to be so focussed on DACA and illegal immigrants, that the legal ones are left in limbo.

Compare that to the number of immigrants from India, most of them use up family’s life savings to study in the US and try to recover from working in US. Unlike students from other countries, who can apply for a green card when they are studying (by getting a willing employer through their connections), can get their work authorization and Green Card itself before their 3 yr OPT expires.

Which means, there’s mostly people from backlogged countries, applying for h1b visas!

That means, there’ll be some %age of applicants who are willing to get treated like slaves by the employer, and these are the employees who have poisoned the basket of apples. And USCIS is looking at the basket very suspiciously.

http://www.livemint.com/Industry/pHkRcTtIoKd8MkTkBNdtSN/Info...

In a country as large as the US, that two consulting companies picked up nearly 10% of the country's visa allotment for a certain category of worker is part of the problem in itself.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...

Although, would be super interesting to see this as a proposal from a "moderate" Democrat.

Also completely ignores traditional criteria for immigration, like oppressed people, security concerns, spouses and family members, and health status.

Also, author jokes about population density of places like the UK, but how long would it take to actually build the infrastructure to accommodate a mass influx of new residents, especially if they tended to congregate in a small number of areas with good jobs or other people of their ethnic or linguistic groups?

More immigrants could easily participate in building more infrastructure. They did so in the past.

This is obviously the sensible approach, but most people who comment on Hacker News immigration threads are nativist. They might pretend to be liberal or progressive [1], but at their core they're no different from the Jim Crow segregationists of the '50s. Changing your in-group from being based on the color of your skin to the patch of dirt you were born on doesn't change the basic immorality of your position.

[1] Though it must be said that progressivism and nativism have been very close friends historically, and continue to be so in the form of NIMBYs.

Because that's not what the H1-B is. The majority of H1-B holders are the IT body shops: Cognizant, Infosys, and Tata are the top 3 by a wide margin [1]. I agree with you in principle but I think the H1-B system is not a good implementation of those ideals. I have a hard time believing it does much more than depress the wages of American white collar workers.

1. http://fortune.com/2017/08/03/companies-h1b-visa-holders/

It makes it viable to keep white collar jobs in the midwest.

The company I work for announced they are no longer using these "IT body shops," as you put it. The local pool of workers is totally exhausted, so they can't find enough people to hire, and have decided to close up shop in the midwest and will be moving development to an ultra-high COL tech hub.

Officially, only developers are getting the ax. But I have to assume the rest of the staff are in line. The developers managers should probably be co-located, and if all the dev and managers are co-located, then so should the product managers and their teams. PMs and sales work pretty closely, so it's not hard to imagine those positions will move, etc, etc.

People love to throw out econ 101 supply/demand stuff here, and claim that obviously more tech workers = lower tech worker salaries. But that does not appear to be the case. Regions with more tech workers also pay higher salaries; there's a clear inverse relationship going on.

So, in my interpretation of the empirical evidence we have, suggests that more H1-Bs would raise developer/engineer wages, not suppress them.

P.S. It's clear that IT staff do face downward wage pressure from offshoring. But they also face the same from automation of their jobs (cloud services, SaaS, etc).

That's not what the data says in the article you linked.

It also lists companies such as Apple, Google, IBM, JP Morgan, etc. as part of the majority. Consultancies like Cognizant, Infosys, and Tata are not even close to the majority of H1B holders.

http://www.livemint.com/Industry/pHkRcTtIoKd8MkTkBNdtSN/Info...

I do agree that I think those outsourcing talent shop should be limited. You shouldn't have majority of your workforce on h1b.

As a counter point I don't think Google, Apple, Microsoft etc are not out of line. Also many startups that are founded by immigrants (50%) and often also hire international talent (since there isn't enough local one). Also startups are not able to compete on salaries like larger companies. If the article is beloved, 63% h1bs go to other than these top companies.

The OP comment still holds that I think startups and hiring international talent does contribute to the US economy and it's just not for "depressing white collar wages".

Trump is not gutting the H1-B system (currently). All they did was start asking companies to prove that the H1-B was going to an applicant who actually meets the requirements of the visa. If companies are worried about the change that's pretty clear evidence the program is being abused.

A sizeable portion of Trump's base believes that they are in danger of becoming a minority in "their own" country and will sidestep the economic benefits of immigration to retain a demographic majority. To these voters, power and influence is a zero-sum game where the many exercise absolute reign over the few (constitutional equality be damned), and sharing the pie with immigrants puts them at risk of becoming the few.

So there's a pragmatic question of how to avoid putting yourself at a disadvantage by being comparatively overgenerous that you don't have to be a "paleoconservative" or Trump supporter, or even Republican, to be concerned about.

>if you make more than a certain amount not if you invest over a certain amount.

I don't know any developed countries with that system. Do you?

There might have technically been other minimal requirements like knowing English or the local language, but most people who fulfill the pay requirements will fulfill the minor requirements too if applicable.

If so that's not the same as an income requirement at all.

If not, I'd like a list of them because that's very interesting.

I'm sure lots of countries have similar rules.

They have to demonstrate that they can't find a citizen to do the job etc...?

But: - tech salaries aren't US competitive - people often speak Danish (sometimes it's a requirement)

And while you'll probably do fine with English in Denmark in general. Long term you would need to learn the language. And to be fair, it's a useless language, there is only 5M speakers, why would anyone spend time learning that? :)

And yes, you would experience racism too. Just because it's a borderline social-libertarian paradise doesn't mean all the people are angels.

A disadvantage or an advantage? It's always seemed to me that people from other countries and cultures contributed very positively to what the US is today.

One thing that gets somewhat ignored for political reasons is assimilation/integration. Of course there was never a purely smooth, even, perfect melting pot, and there's a large history of enclaves in America, but today there are parties taking that to a prescriptive rule of "don't culturally appropriate" that feels self-defeating (and just dumb, frankly).

There's also room for a discussion of what good qualities to explicitly promote adoption of for shared values, etc.

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.8408304,-79.398378,3a,53.5y,...

You might like to ruminate on teh fact that while Trump demonizes immigrants out of one side of his mouth, the resort he owns at Mar-A-Lago- was able to get 70 H1-B visas to hire hotel staff, despite the availability of some 5000 such people in Florida's state employment opportunities database and a whole lot of US citizens in Puerto Rico that are in search of economic opportunity right about now. Not that you were making a partisan point, but this is a great example of how the rhetorical divisions in American politics do not line up with the business practices.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

" What US Democrats ignore is that practically every damn country in the world does this too, often to a higher degree than the US.

So there's a pragmatic question of how to avoid putting yourself at a disadvantage by being comparatively overgenerous that you don't have to be a "paleoconservative" or Trump supporter, or even Republican, to be concerned about. "

my point is that things have shifted, and is perfectly in line with the parent which has +1 vote and was not considered a 'troll'..

line-of-discusison kthx

You're missing an 's' there. To make life a bit easier and to focus the discussion here is an easy to digest page on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

If after reading that you still feel that JFK would be a fascist then I don't know what to do next.

I said "By modern dem logic, JFK would be a facist"

now, thankfully corrected to:

"By modern dem logic, JFK would be a fascist"

not that I actually believed him to be a facscist.

glad you caught that 1 letter spelling typo though..

" What US Democrats ignore is that practically every damn country in the world does this too, often to a higher degree than the US.

So there's a pragmatic question of how to avoid putting yourself at a disadvantage by being comparatively overgenerous that you don't have to be a "paleoconservative" or Trump supporter, or even Republican, to be concerned about. "

my point is that things have shifted, and is perfectly in line with the parent which has +1 vote and was not considered a 'troll'..

line-of-discusison kthx.

Why did you put scare quotes around "their own"? Is it not their own country?

Culture changes over time no matter what you do, but is it completely unreasonable to want your culture to change slowly enough that you can still function in your dotage?

The point of linking that is only to question whether there are people who want their culture to change more slowly for reasons other than prejudice. Should "obviously wrong" dramatic cultural shifts like gay marriage somehow be slowed so people can get used to the idea? Even in the linked example, there are clearly other forces at work (anti-Muslim propaganda) which seem to exist purely to make it appear that the culture itself is changing entirely, when in reality it's just becoming more mixed race.

[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/600/...

I think the quotes are to suggest that those voters habitually overestimate their share of ownership, compared to everyone else in the country.

For clearer and not-political example, consider the average cat and "their house". It is true that they are a legitimate and valued member of the household... But the quotes suggest something about the way the cat sees the world.

A great deal of anger seems to be conservatives wanting to engineer the outcome rather than allowing culture to become more inclusive to people not like them e.g. more companies voluntarily saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. This voluntary push to accomidate more non-christian customers is viewed as the "war" on Christmas, with the proposed "solution" being fewer non-christians in the country.

This is absolutely incorrect, Americans do not have freedom of association, so people of other cultures can always live with you, work with you, buy from you, etc - by law. Whether you think that's a good thing or not, that is a fact: you can't have an enclave in any meaningful sense.

Yes, our society. The people already here. People seem to have a hard time grasping that the culture who founded the modern US gov't are indeed those people, or it's somehow become offensive. Even a 1st generation immigrant would agree with that, but not some revisionist who brings up the American Indians as if fair amends haven't been made there or somehow a new government completely void of their influence is somehow not the founding of the country.

I hope these same people go around the internet beating the drum on east Asian immigration policies and immigrant acceptance along with Israel. You'd think this country is evil and I completely disagree we're as bad as these finger-wagging liberals insist we are with their scare quotes.

Because these arguments just condense to 'We got here first' talk?

Don't dish it out if you can't take it.

Don't we all agree that what happened to the indigenous tribes was a tragedy and we don't ever want to repeat it?

Doesn't it highlight the problem with unchecked immigration?

This is really reminding me of how supporters of the Confederacy insist on talking about the 'War of Northern Aggression' despite being the ones that started the conflict. Perhaps you could consider matters from a less absolutist perspective.

Actually they are simply pissed at that fact- since the end of slavery and colonialism, life has gotten simply too hard.

Also you have to live in the situation now where you are continually reminded you are no racial superman, and some one you thought was way beneath your station is now routinely beating you in highly intellectual activities.

This is not new to the US. Bulk of Indias current social friction problems happen because the previously lower caste people are doing well off in life now. Now economy might be a growing pie on the longer run, but on the shorter run, its just competition for limited resources at the end. If you previously were a upper caste person albeit not very capable, you could still succeed easily, given only your castes were allowed to study and prosper. Today with more people having an opportunity to compete, you just don't stand a chance. Now imagine being a upper caste person who only until recently had to merely exist to succeed to now having to compete and routinely be beaten by people whom you think are beneath you.

Things don't work well.

To those seasoned to privilege, equality feels like oppression - Internet Quote

The key question is: are they right?

Why would you hand over the keys to your kingdom to people who will displace you and rule against you?

I'd like to hear the list of places doing far better than MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. in STEM fields. I mean I know there are pretty good schools around, but can you really say MIT is "lagging far behind" them?

> higher education in the US is prohibitively expensive

That's because when you buy "higher education" in US you buy something entirely different from what is understood by "education" in other countries. But if you want to, you have options to buy the actual education too. It won't be brand-name, but that's the cost of brand names. Here's contradiction with the first propositions - if US brands were so bad, they won't be that much in demand, would they?

> No more American students that can compete with Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, or German ones

There is a subtle fallacy here. You're comparing average US student with top-of-the crop students with the rest of the world. Not every Japanese student competes with US ones - the mediocre ones stay in Japan, the excellent ones go to compete in the US. Of course, mediocre US student would not look that excellent compared to top of the crop from 7bln pool. But that is excellent for the US that they are able to become the concentration point for the top talent. This needs to be guarded and preserved.

> I just don't understand why we wouldn't want to make it as easy as possible to steal talent that another country invested in

This is another side of what I mentioned before. It is good for the nation, but being mediocre student in that environment sucks. Mediocre Japanese student can remain in Japan and be relatively OK. Mediocre student somewhere in talent concentration point is screwed - he's where the top talent of the world is, and has to compete with them for any nice opportunities. It is hard. And they can't just go to Japan and take the place of those top Japanese students that left for the US (well, some small number can, but in general it's not easy). It is a real problem, and so far we don't have very good solution for it. Until we do, we'll have to deal with this kind of resentment, and telling people "well, it's good for the nation" won't help them much.

I have zero doubt that the average Japanese student blows the average American student out of the water. But the US produces both a greater number and a greater degree of ridiculously talented and driven students.

Asian countries generally have a high average and low variance distribution in students. The US has a lower average but a much higher variance and thus has more outlier students on both ends of the spectrum. Whether this is good or bad would depend on your perspective.

Someone up thread seemed to think the average student of another country would blow away the average US student. I don't think this is true. The US pays lip service to universal education more then most other countries. Unfortunately we don't follow through on it and this leaves a large enough number of substandard schools to make a significant impact on US test averages. The sad fact is the tail end of these averages are so bad they bring down the score, but the "average" for the majority of US students is much higher.

This stratification of education is probably a significant contributor to the stratification of wealth in the US, and it's not OK.

I am assuming you are talking about K12 education. That is pretty absurd.

California currently spends about 10k per student for public education. That makes 30k sound crazy, but in 1970 California spent 5500 which is about 35k in 2017 dollars. California (and most of the US) is woefully underfunding it's schools.

[1] https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/they-spend...

This is certainly not my experience of the US public school system, either as a student or a parent. The typical US school has always cared more about getting 20th-percentile students to meet a minimum standard. And if the student makes an effort to work with the school, the school is very good at it. Public schools are evaluated based on how many students meet that minimum standard ("No Child Left Behind"), and they respond to that incentive.

The 80th to 90th percentile students, well, they're kind of an afterthought. I mean, they're going to ace all the standardized exams anyway. Now, some public schools will make an effort to help high-performing students, because teachers do care, but it's not incentivized.

Private schools, on the other hand, are evaluated on a very different metric—how many students get into Harvard/Yale/Stanford/etc.? They game this metric by offering generous scholarships to top-notch students, and by charging stiff tuition to rich parents.

Schools in the US are locally controlled.

There are places that run schools like this. And there are school systems that have fantastic magnet schools for gifted students.

Given the lower salaries and longer working hours in Japan, I'm not convinced that the mediocre Japanese student is better of than the mediocre US student. Even if the Japanese student scores a "better" job (in relation to the opportunities available locally) than the US student, the absolute differences between job markets can make his job worse.

Overall it's not too bad a deal compared to the bifurcating job outcomes we see in the States.

But you're basically never going to be fired and generally speaking companies do genuinely seek to "take care of" their people in ways that US companies no longer do (but used to, many decades ago). It's a highly frustrating environment for a restless high performer, but for the mediocre college grad I don't think it's a bad deal at all.

They grew up there, know the culture, and have been trained/educated to navigate its waters.

Also protip: "this is not a debate" doesn't make you automatically win a debate.

A: X is true.

B: Please provide proof.

A: Here is metric using averaging over large populations.

B: Using averages over large populations is hiding important details about X.

A: How else we could compare large populations?! We must use globals averages!

B: Averages have the effect of very small number of very bad instances distort the result of large population which would have much better results, thus making it appear bad results are much more common than they are actually are. We know specifically this is the case for the question we are discussing.

A: Well, that's how averages work, nothing can be done about it.

Don't you think something is missing here?

PS: you know medians exist and those studies account for it, right? Nobody is saying YOUR school is mediocre.

There's many studies about this, it's not a controversial topic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_...

There are states and metro areas in the US with (and this is the important part) populations as large as many high ranked European countries that rank at the very top of the world in any educational metric.

The study only compares averages and that's all that people are saying. It's totally possible that the best secondary school in the world is in the US but that's not the point.

And I don't see how population size is important, as you say. Schools in the US are locally funded, no?

Surely you understand that averages are often misleading and can be worse than useless.

The US is the most diverse large country in the world. Averages do not work well when comparing highly varied populations.

>And I don't see how population size is important, as you say.

There are many smaller countries with better average educational outcomes than the US. But none of the countries with higher scores are anywhere near the size and diversity of the US.

The only country even close to the US in population is China and you'll note that test scores are only available for the highest performing provinces.

If you want to make a proper comparison, you'd need to compare the US with something like the entire continent of Europe.

Finland is more analogous to say Massachusetts than it is to the entire US.

So why are you complaining in a conversation talking about averages?

>>> The US is the most diverse large country in the world.

Brazil and India would like a word. Also, irrelevant.

>>> Averages do not work well when comparing highly varied populations.

That's why you have averages. Again, how else would you compare countries?

>>> There are many smaller countries with better average educational outcomes than the US. But none of the countries with higher scores are anywhere near the size and diversity of the US.

And? How are those things relayed? Seriously, how is diversity related to federally provided education?

>>>The only country even close to the US in population is China

Well great, in a conversation comparing China and the US that might be relevant, but this is not it.

>>> If you want to make a proper comparison, you'd need to compare the US with something like the entire continent of Europe.

Why? You actually think population and diversity are even close? Or relevant? Just trying to understand your logic because it doesn't make sense.

You're the one who is using averages. Everyone else here is telling you averages are a misleading metric here when trying to compare the US to other countries.

Averages are not useful for comparing diverse data sets.

The mean tells you a lot about a hypothetical population where everyone has an IQ of 100. It doesn't tell you a lot about a population where half the people have an IQ of 75 and half 125. Using mean scores to compare those populations is nearly useless.

>That's why you have averages. Again, how else would you compare countries?

That's just it, you can't use 1 number to compare countries. It's not meaningless, but it's close.

What everyone else. The grandparent literally complained about three people in this thread mentioning a fact without sources about averages. I supplied said source. What are you responding to?

>>> Averages are not useful for comparing diverse data sets.

The US is not particularly diverse in the world. And again, how do you compare "diverse" data sets like kids literally being able to read?

>>> The mean tells you a lot about a hypothetical population where everyone has an IQ of 100. It doesn't tell you a lot about a population where half the people have an IQ of 75 and half 125. Using mean scores to compare those populations is nearly useless.

Right, because we actually have countries where half the population is 125 and half is 75, what can I say. /s

>>> That's just it, you can't use 1 number to compare countries. It's not meaningless, but it's close

Tell that to the OECD.

Why do you care so must about this comparison of averages? Why are you commenting?

I like how you literally don't answer half my replies, makes one think what's the point of this.

Me and the other person who replied to you. "The US is also exceptional in how bad its bad schools are, this drags our averages down. While it's a tragedy for the kids who are not being served, it's a distortion to say all US schools are bad when most are not."

>The US is not particularly diverse in the world.

I'm sorry I can no longer take you seriously.

>And again, how do you compare "diverse" data sets like kids literally being able to read?

An average is nearly useless if you don't know the distribution. Rankings based on averages are meaningless.

>Right, because we actually have countries where half the population is 125 and half is 75, what can I say

How could you think an example that works out with nice easy numbers is supposed to actually represent a real country?

>Why are you commenting?

Because of this

>Oh come on, every study puts the US in a mediocre position in education within the OECD. That's not a debate.

Because it is debatable. Using PISA rankings to say that the US is in a mediocre position in education is very controversial. In addition to using the mean of a set of test scores, they don't take into account the percentage of 15 year olds still in school, or the percentage of 15 year olds who take the test. The US goes WAY up in the ranks when those things are taken into account.

> Me and the other person who replied to you. "The US is also exceptional in how bad its bad schools are, this drags our averages down. While it's a tragedy for the kids who are not being served, it's a distortion to say all US schools are bad when most are not."

You really think this is not true elsewhere? Inequality doesn't exist in other countries? Do you really think medians are unheard of for scientists and they didn't take that into account? Please.

>>> The US is not particularly diverse in the world.

> I'm sorry I can no longer take you seriously.

You know there's studies ranking countries based on diversity right? You want me to Google them for you?

Oh wait, you probably think they're missing something clearly obvious like not knowing what a median is again.

>>> And again, how do you compare "diverse" data sets like kids literally being able to read?

> An average is nearly useless if you don't know the distribution. Rankings based on averages are meaningless.

Great if you think that. Show me a better way to compare countries when it comes to reading skills.

>>> Why are you commenting? > Because of this

You just said you don't believe the study is relevant. So why do you care what it says.

>>>Oh come on, every study puts the US in a mediocre position in education within the OECD. That's not a debate.

> Because it is debatable.

It's really not and it's the best we have.

> Using PISA rankings to say that the US is in a mediocre position in education is very controversial.

Again, it's really not. Haven't seen any counter studies, happy to see them.

Not saying there's no criticisms obviously.

> The US goes WAY up in the ranks when those things are taken into account.

Go on then, show the studies, I'm willing to change my mind.

You have way too much faith in rankings you see on the internet.

> Show me a better way to compare countries when it comes to reading skills.

Median scores, mean with standard deviation, box plots. All of those are better. None are great because comparing reading scores in different languages in a meaningful way is nearly impossible.

For example, Chinese children take much longer to develop their vocabulary than American students because of the way their language is written. Because of this you can't possibly construct a test that makes an accurate comparison between Chinese and American students.

You might as well try to make a test comparing how well American schools teach welding to how how well Chinese schools teach painting.

>You know there's studies ranking countries based on diversity right? You want me to Google them for you?

And only 1 of the countries that ranks higher than the US in diversity ranks higher than us on the PISA list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

The countries the US is unfavorably compared to nearly all appear near the bottom of that list.

It also doesn't take into account the amount of difference between cultures. For example, an African country where 20% of the people speak a different language from and don't intermarry with the dominant culture, but that have lived side by side with the dominant culture for hundreds of years will be ranked the same as a country where 20% of the people are immigrants from a country on the other side of the world.

The US has a far larger percentage of immigrants than any other country, and from far more countries.

Furthermore the US has far higher income inequality than most of the countries that outperform it.

>You just said you don't believe the study is relevant. So why do you care what it says.

It's not. I care that people are pushing PISA rankings as some kind of objective measurement of countries' education systems, and because of that politicians use them to try to push changes without understanding what the rankings actually show.

I can assure that in among academics in education PISA rankings are very controversial. Despite all your insistence about not being debatable it most definitely is.

Here's an example of some of the criticsm

--From the Times Educational Supplement

https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/long-read... https://www.tes.com/news/tes-archive/tes-publication/pisa-ra...

"With greater power comes greater scrutiny. In 2013, TES revealed damning new allegations against Pisa from statistical and mathematical experts who said that what had become the world’s most influential education league tables were, in fact, “useless”, produced “meaningless” rankings and were compiled using techniques that were “utterly wrong”.

In response, the OECD admitted that “large variation in single country ranking positions is likely” because of the methods it used. For example, in 2009 the organisation said that the UK’s Pisa ranking out of a total of 74 countries was between 19th and 27th for reading, between 23rd and 31st for maths, and between 14th and 19th for science.

But this admission has made little difference to how rankings are reported in the media, and Pisa does not put the caveats centre stage. The resulting league tables are often taken as definitive statements on the quality of schools systems. And the stakes have become so high that a slip of a few positions caused by statistical variation might today spell the end of an education policy or even a minister’s career."

--From an open letter to the OECD by over 100 academics

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/06/oecd-pisa-...

"Critique #1: Whereas the explicit purpose of ranking countries by average test score is to allow for inferences about the quality of national educational systems, the ranking is misleading because the samples of students in different countries have different levels of family academic resources (FAR)."

"Critique #4: The OECD has repeatedly held up Shanghai students and the Shanghai educational system as a model for the rest of the world and as representative of China, yet the sample is not representative even of the Shanghai 15-year-old population and certainly not of China. In addition, Shanghai schools systematically exclude migrant youth. These issues should have kept Shanghai scores out of any OECD comparison group and raise serious questions about the OECD’s brand as an international testing agency."

"Develop alternatives to league tables: explore more meaningful and less easily sensationalised ways of reporting assessment outcomes. For example, comparing developing countries, where 15-year-olds are regularly drafted into child labour, with first-world countries makes neither educational nor political sense and opens OECD up for charges of educational colonialism.

--From a guardian article

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/dec/03/pisa-methodolog...

"From the outset, Pisa has been met with scepticism, criticism and even outrage, most of which has stemmed from the claim that the study's findings are arbitrary. One such voice was Dr Svein Sjøberg of the University of Oslo, who claimed that a small change in question choice or weightings could result in a big change in a country's overall rankings."

"The sheer breadth of Pisa has also raised questions about the comparability of results within it. Even those who accept it is fair to assess countries and economies alongside one another question some of the cultural factors that divide them. Joachim Wuttke, a teacher of computer science in Germany, is one such sceptic. Wuttke looked at which students failed to complete the test and which preferred to increase their speed – even at the risk of increasing their errors. He found significant differences in student behaviour that affected student performance:"

"At a more fundamental level, some have pointed to the difficulties of testing students in such a wide array of languages. If such a thing as a perfect translation exists (few would argue it does) it might still not be enough to control for students' differing interpretations of the same set of instructions."

"There is also a temptation to grab at averages from Pisa to understand the performance of a country. Doing so would obscure the vast differences that can occur regionally within a country – such an oversight can be particularly dangerous, say critics, for understanding the true academic opportunities available in a country."

"Meanwhile, countries such as Finland, a consistent top-performer in the Pisa league tables, has been accused of failing miserably on other international academic tests such as TIMSS. Why? Gabriel H Sahlgren, the author of a book on the dubiousness of the Finnish miracle claims it is “because its centralised curriculum has ignored certain concepts that are not tested in Pisa”."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/...

http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2015/10/international-te...

https://www.uv.es/RELIEVE/v22n1/RELIEVEv22n1_M15eng.pdf

Irrelevant. You and the grandparent are making an irrelevant point again and again. Why bring up diversity at all?

>>> It also doesn't take into account the amount of difference between cultures. For example ...

I already said there was going to be a "median" example... I was right about that, shocker. /s

>>> The US has a far larger percentage of immigrants than any other country, and from far more countries.

Except Canada and Switzerland and many other countries, right?

Thanks for the criticisms about PISA, never said they weren't any (see my previous comment). I asked repeatedly for alternatives instead.

The criticisms are pretty weak as well.

"In addition, Shanghai schools systematically exclude migrant youth."

If they are migrants, they're not representing the local education system now do they?

Because it's highly relevant when talking about an average value. The more heterogeneous a population is the less likely an average is to be useful.

>I already said there was going to be a "median" example... I was right about that, shocker. /s

Ranking by mean often isn't useful...shocker

>Except Canada and Switzerland and many other countries, right?

Sorry I meant large countries.

>If they are migrants, they're not representing the local education system now do they?

They're talking about long term migrants that represent about 40% of the population.

Look at Australia were 90% of 15 year olds are enrolled in school, vs. a country like Vietnam where 15 year olds routinely drop out and work.

How does that comparison make sense?

Some other examples.

In South Korea parents force their children to spend 4 or 5 hours with private tutors after school each day. South Korea performs very well on PISA league tables, but it probably says very little about the efficacy of the Korean school system vs any other country where parent don't routinely force their kids to pull double school shifts with private tutors.

Finland spends much more time teaching fractions than algebra to 15 year olds. The US outperforms them on algebra questions, but Finland outperforms on fraction questions. But PISA weighs fraction questions much higher than algebra questions.

In the US homeschooling is common. In Germany it's illegal. Home schoolers score much higher on the SAT and ACT, so in the US you're pulling 3 or 4% of the likely highest scoring students out of the pool--of course that's going to drastically affect the mean score.

We can't come up with tests that accurately compare abilities across cultures in the US. How can we possibly do it across 65 countries.

The answer is, you can't do it. Attempting to do it, failing, and publishing data that makes it look like you can is more harmful than just not publishing at all.

The critiques are numerous and come from very respected publications, organizations, and academics.

You can disagree with the critiques all you want, but you can't pretend the debate is over, and that there is some kind of settled science here.

Do you? I thought we were talking about OECD studies not "big" countries. My mistake.

I guess it was just a matter of time until "big" came up after "diversity".

>>> We can't come up with tests that accurately compare abilities across cultures in the US. How can we possibly do it across 65 countries.

Well then, let's just give up and not compare countries anymore. /s

>>> You can disagree with the critiques all you want

I'm not, I said that before.

The thing is, when debating, it's useful to think if your opponent has a falsifiable claim. Since you don't, this conversation is useless. I literally cannot provide any evidence for country comparisons, because it's literally impossible from your point of view. So I'm done.

The most significant research happens at the graduate level and beyond. US students are disproportionately under represented at the graduate level. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...

The high cost for US students in undergrad is one reason for this. These schools haven't been lagging behind because grad students found a to H1->GC->Citizen. If that path becomes difficult, then these students will just stay in their home countries.

This is why its never a nice idea for most people to work at a place like Google.

Iceland, with a population of ~300,000, was able to qualify in (arguably) the toughest region in the world. The US has about 1000 people for every Icelandic citizen, and yet we couldn't even qualify in (arguably) the EASIEST region in the world.

I'm simply dumbfounded by how bad the US team is. Let's just hope we get there next time.

The thing is, we aren't just "bad": we're terrible by any standard out there. It's borderline pitiful. And look at how good the women's team is...

One of my "countries of origin" has basically qualified at least (Tunisia). Now we wait for Australia...

Why is it that we cannot compete with foreign companies with native workers? Why should those countries be okay with losing their top talent?

Shoudnt we solve the problem of native workers not having the right skills before we open the borders to everyone else?

The other argument I understand is cultural. How much immigration can a society take before it is unrecognizable to the people that live there. You can't say that if you moved 100 million indians to the US ( A fairly small number of the population) it wouldn't look and feel completely different.

Note that this isn't new. During and after WWII the US worked hard to bring scientists to the US to prevent them working for the enemy. Just one example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

What sort of thinking is this? People stopped being subjects of their countries a while ago. Countries should compete for people, not trap them. If a country isn't OK with losing its top talent it should fix its institutions to make itself competitive.

You know what country doesn't allow its citizens to leave? North Korea.

Besides, remittances are a thing.

But why is it "making it" in some countries to leave and go to America? Why not build up your own country and affect their living standards in a positive way?

Personally I have no desire to leave my country because I like it and want to make it better. I think that is a healthy way to think about your identity.

Many reasons.

* Because they'll be able to add more value to society in the other country.

* Because they're part of a marginalized group and the other country has better protections for people like them. Maybe they can't get married in their home country but can in the other country, say.

* Most importantly, because they might not want to.

People should generally be free to do what they like, right?

> I have no desire to leave my country because I like it and want to make it better.

Great, sounds awesome! You're free to do as you desire. Others have different desires or constraints and should be free to do as they wish as well.

I can answer that in a personal way. Because I don't care.

The modern world is capitalist, especially with software. If your work is worth X dollars, why would you work for X/10 dollars? Because of nationalism?

Would it be too bold for me to say it has some cultural reasons? Perhaps the openness to innovation? or maybe the way people think about solving new problems? Why not try to instill these cultural mechanisms in the country you came from? I hope i'm not coming across as a cultural imperialist but I am genuinely curious.

Also I don't think people should migrate for purely financial reasons. There is a lot of rich and interesting cultures in this world - it would be a shame if people just abandoned them for the sake of money.

It's usually an institutional problem. For example, a country where the laws governing business are predictable will work better than one where businesses are at the whim of a local authority.

For more along those lines, check out Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson.

> Why not try to instill these cultural mechanisms in the country you came from?

So work twice as hard to get half as far?

Are you asking me why some places pay more than others? I don't think I have the expertise to answer that correctly honestly, it's probably a multitude of factors.

But I don't think it's cultural (or mostly cultural) since it happens within countries too. Silicon valley pays more than the Midwest, London pays more than Birmingham. I don't know why exactly but it's undeniable that they do.

>>> Why not try to instill these cultural mechanisms in the country you came from?

Because I don't think it's cultural. And even if it were... Why would I do that? My family is more important that some vague notion of changing cultural mechanisms.

>>> Also I don't think people should migrate for purely financial reasons. There is a lot of rich and interesting cultures in this world - it would be a shame if people just abandoned them for the sake of money

Sorry to be blunt, but it's not your choice. People's lives and priorities are their own to make.

This sounds too much like airmchair philosophy. It's great that you can do it but it's not "just money" for the vast majority of people, rich country or not.

They are not. But the people there have no options. In my country(India), despite a level of free market reforms, there is still a huge cancer of socialism at large.

Socialist spending, affirmative action policies and corruption are extremely rampant. Public apathy is at peak. Almost anybody smart enough to make genuine difference has only one life style, where he/she has to earn all life to pay nearly 50% of all earned money in taxes and yet live a third world quality life.

So there is only one option. Just immigrate and save yourself the trouble.

>>How much immigration can a society take before it is unrecognizable to the people that live there.

You might want to take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

To your point though, I suspect a lot of older voters grew up with much lower immigration (due to the Immigration Act of 1924) and so this level feels really high to them even though it was common for a large part of US history.

There is an argument that there is enough of a cultural difference for it to affect the country one way or another.

Ironical, given Thanksgiving is a few weeks from now.

Is that an argument for or against immigration by people with different cultural values?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I guess you will sit in your camp and I will sit in mine; no reason to have a civil discussion about the complex topic of immigration.

which itself is a conveniently ambiguous phrase.

FDR was white. FDR was nationalist.

Was he a 'White Nationalist'?

certainly not, but if he publicly held the same political positions he held less than a century before the label would more than likely be applied.

I completely 100% agree that the US is losing its edge in many ways. And a real visa program would help. But at the moment the H1B program is bad for almost everyone involved, unless you own stock in Infosys/Tata etc.

http://fortune.com/2017/08/03/companies-h1b-visa-holders/

We need to replace it with a real immigration program that weeds out the crap and brings in the best. As it stands super smart people are getting their visas denied while offshoring firms depress wages and take American jobs while producing sub-par products.

The thing to remember about US education is that it's highly different between the haves and have-nots. That's a problem in itself, but it's a giant oversimplification to jump to "US educations are generally poor." (One of the other high school and college cost-drivers/arms-race-drivers is competing to attract foreign students.)

There's a gap in China as well but it's made up for by a massive population. Lord forbid they close their gap, that'll be the end of any other country's ability to compete as China and India just throw five hundred million engineers each at their technology sector.

The bottom 50% has gotten fucked by loss of jobs/industries/career paths/debt, but H1Bs aren't helping with that.

So if your contention is "we need to figure out how to better invest in the whole population" I agree, but I don't see the other half of the equation being an overly large limiting point.

If anything, if we're in the lead industry-wise, does importing young talent, teaching them these things, and making it easier for that experience to be taken elsewhere really help long-run? Almost sounds more like a case for paranoid isolationism immigration-wise.

We're never gonna have a billion people in the US in my lifetime, but I don't think that's necessary for there to be enough US self-driven industry to have a nice, happy, productive life.

It's not as a whole. Parts of it are, Education here is local, and there are states the size of Finland that compare with Finland in education outcomes.

>2 and higher education in the US is prohibitively expensive compared to other developed nations

Income based repayment ensures that you will never pay more than 10% of your disposable income (income over 1.5x the federal poverty level), and loans are forgiven if you make payments for 20 years. This assumes you only take out federal loans (90% of loan disbursements are federal and are enough to pay for public universities).

This is very similar to the system Australia has.

Additionally, the US ranks 7th in number of adults with college degree--higher than every European country except Luxembourg.

And the US has 1/3 of the top 500 ranked colleges in the world, and nearly 1/4 of the top 5000.

I doubt many families have 10% of income to spare.

>I doubt many families have 10% of income to spare.

For a family of 4, it's 10% of income over $37k, not 10% of income.

If that family made the median household income of $59k, they'd be paying about $180 a month in loan repayments.

An alternate way to look at this is that the economy and society of the USA is failing its own citizens by either giving them an inadequate education or not providing them opportunities to succeed. And your proposal is to simply write everyone who's already here off, declare them to be rejects, and import new people over the top of them to be worker bees for the elite.

I can say that I'm not really personally concerned with how many billionaires we have in the US, or how many multinational corporations are headquartered here. I'd be fine if that all went to China, so long as the USA stayed the land of fairness and justice.

US millennials are a bunch of people with most privilege, comfort, opportunities, freedom and other nation level perks(like infrastructure, mobility etc) compared to may be all the humans combined in all of history.

There is a reason why you can't get more out of this scheme. The reason is you can only make incremental progress in systems that are this advanced. And after that its usually a bit of Math called 'Central limit theorem'. It just means the progress will only be around the mean.

That ship sailed a while ago.

Yes, and I have completely lost faith in the US's ability, on a federal level, to staunch that failure, as long as the Republican party continues to exist.

>write off everyone who's already here

I agree that I'm being pessimistic, but I feel that's what the government is aggressively trying to do (by, for example, putting a person hostile to education in charge of the agency that runs education at a federal level).

The democrats have had control over the house or the senate for 62 out of the past 84 years, and both of them for 52 years (in total, not contiguously). There has also been a Democratic president for 48 of those years. If you're mad at the way things are, I don't think it makes sense to be mad at the Republican party, unless it's for constantly losing.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Combined...

However, do economic gains flow to Americans? No, not really because we don't have socialist systems in place to distribute the wealth gained from "stealing talent". So yes stealing talent is good, but it really only benefits corporate shareholders and upper class Americans. The unhappy Americans who are voting for "America First" don't see the gains from startups and tech companies; they are geographically isolated from these companies and even if they lived in California (or any other tech center) they lack the skills to be employed.

So essentially in my view you have a conflict of interest. It is in the best economic interest of the country to be able to attract talent. However, the US is a democracy and unless the economic gains are spread across the entire population, this will not satisfy, "we the people"

So we have really two options in response 1) implement socialist systems to spread wealth to the population or 2) go isolationist to insist that wealth only flows inward

It's embedded in American culture that socialism is bad which is why #2 has been the chose solution.

But that's not the typical H1B. There are "Manager Trainees" at slaughterhouses making 35k.

http://h1bdata.info/index.php?job=MANAGER+TRAINEE

Developers making between 30k - 70k are quite common.

Putting in an 80k or so wage floor would be a huge improvement to the current system.

If someone is living on sub 60k in the US, their job is certainly not one that requires an H1B.

I wouldn't say that for college level education. Why is then the US the top study abroad destination in the world?

This just isn't true at all.

Average state schools that are affordable to the vast majority of students through income based student loan repayments are far better than mediocre.

The US has 1/3 of the top 500 ranked colleges in the world, and nearly 1/4 of the top 5000.

http://www.webometrics.info/en/node/54

There's a reason that international students flock to even low ranked state schools in the US.

I wouldn't say that is filling up.

http://graphics.wsj.com/international-students/

- The USA is massive compared to every first-world nation (in the West) in terms of size / population / schools. I'd be shocked if a place like Sweden were somehow the top, statistically.

- I know a few people who came from India to study here because it put them on a fast track for a visa (or whatever they're using to work here after graduating). So they based it on post-grad opportunities, not the education itself.

But assuming you can't get into those schools, any middle ranked US state school is a better bet.

Zero sum thinking and all that.

China: + Cultural familiarity, closeness to family. + High pay for engineering. - Pollution - Lack of work/life balance culture.

US: - Lack of safety. - Culturally lost. + Higher pay + Better natural environment. + Better future for kids. Schools & stuff.

Censorship is a minor concern for the most part except for political activists. It's arguable that that the US is becoming more draconian in this regard, especially due to police being able to do whatever they want once they decide you're guilty of something.

This is known almost forever now. Even the hard core immigrant hating racists know that their social security checks are coming in because of some one generated more than proportionate share of economic value, and by that definition taxes. And that someone is mostly likely a non-white immigrant.

They just don't like to be reminded of this fact everyday that their bread comes from the very source they hate.

That's only the half of it. The US gives out far more F-1 student visas than H-1Bs (roughly 3x). That means that US infrastructure trains the student, but then the US doesn't get to take advantage of his or her output. Its really a lose-lose for the US.

Now that national unemployment has plummeted to remarkably low levels, we may again truly find ourselves needing to import workers.

https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506

Peak unemployment during that period just after the 2008 financial crisis was still just under 10%, and it has been steadily decreasing since then.

It's not exactly nothing and it sucks if you are one of the unemployed but an unemployment ratio between 5 and 10% is actually not all that bad.

Significant unemployment were 2009, 2010 and before that 1982. By 2013 unemployment in the US was already back down below 7%, historically speaking nothing special, somewhere between 3 and 7% is fairly normal.

The process should be onerous enough that the body shop business that places cheap candidates with marginal skills shouldn’t be a good business, but not too onerous for the high talent individuals for whom it is intended for.

Are those the people we're bringing in with H1-Bs?

I highly recommend a tour around your local university's Chemistry department, as a stark example.

I mean, arguably neither did the Chinese, depending on where you are and how much they've let pollution occur in that area.

I think you are grossly overestimating both the value of these immigrants (it isn't hard to see how much garbage science gets published abroad and how useless a good chunk of international students are) and the entire mechanism for technological improvement and innovation (most of which is market, not PhD, driven).

You also don't cite any sources for your claims; this information would be helpful to anybody seeking to agree or argue with you.

That statement is true of any group of students, international or local. On the other hand, there are good international students (and there are good local students). Is there any reason why you think the ratio isn't the same (in fact, you'd think that the ratio of good international students would be higher because they have to go through far more rigorous testing than the average local student).

And while you might argue they're mostly useless, usually international students make up a large amount of the funding for universities since their fees are usually 5x or sometimes even 10x "local" student fees[1]. So if you like having well-funded universities throwing out international students is a good way to stop that from working.

[1]: My data is from Australia (since that's where I am). In 2017, ~1.3 million students enrolled in higher education -- and ~350k were international students. Most universities have a multiplier of _at least_ 4x for international students taking the same courses as a local student. By simple arithmetic, international students make up more than half of the funding-through-fees of Australian universities.

The author I was replying though doesn't seem to differentiate though, for example, between graduate students coming here to do research and learn cutting-edge things and undergraduates who have wealthy families that export them abroad because of course that's what one does.

You've also kind of nailed another issue on the head: it is more profitable, per student, for universities to bring in international students than to teach local ones. This in turn leads to an increase in pricing for everybody (though probably not as much as due to student loan availability, but that's a different thing) and weird campus behavior to accommodate valued country officials (local school of Rice University, for example, hiding Taiwanese flags during a visit by mainlanders).

As for HECS-HELP loans, this is quite different from a subsidy. It's a loan from the government that has a guaranteed return (pretty good deal for them). But even from your own source, international student fees are 18.8% and total "local" contributions (including HECS loans) are 19.9%. Which is effectively what my original point was -- approximately half of the funding directly from students is from international students even though much less than half of the students are international students (I never said that 50% of total university funding is from international students, please re-read my comment).

If you are a local student and you don't use HECS you still only pay <25% what an international student would pay -- because they have a different per-course-unit fee structure that's far more expensive.

This component of government grants is not broken down on the source I provided, but it is explained in the notes to universities' financial statements. See for example those of Australia's largest university, at p 66 [2]. $345 million was provided under the Commonwealth Grants Scheme, compared to $214 million under HECS-HELP and $58 million from the Australian Research Council (research grants are also provided by other bodies such as the NHMRC). The CGS is the means of funding CSPs, not a source of research grants [3].

Your original point, that 'international students make up more than half of the funding-through-fees,' might actually be correct even if you accept that payments under the CGS are on account of 'fees' (which is the language used in [1]). It is correct at Monash, where international student fees generated $653 million, compared to $1.03 billion from the Australian government including CGS, HECS-HELP and research grants. Monash is an outlier because almost half of its students are international or offshore [4], but it leaves me unsure as to the reliability of my original source. We can certainly agree that international student fees are a very substantial source of income, but I wanted to correct the common misconception that HECS-HELP loans are the sole source of domestic tuition funds.

[1] http://studyassist.gov.au/sites/studyassist/helppayingmyfees...

[2] http://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/844508/mon...

[3] https://www.education.gov.au/commonwealth-grant-scheme-cgs

[4] http://www.monash.edu/about/who/glance

Seriously doubt the USA is making the acquisition of world level talent any harder.

This is definitely a thing, not only in the US but also from thinkers like Alexandr Dugin in Russia. I believe such reactionary political stances are ultimately doomed, though; we are simply not going to un-invent the internet, air travel, containerization and other things that have made the world smaller and allowed a single planetary scale logistical chain to exist, short of nuclear catastrophe or its equivalent.

Skimming the cream from other countries doesn’t really ameliorate those problems.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students...

And so, these Democratic Party supporting liberal minded left-leaning people are in a bind. The new conservative president at least on the surface seems to be doing more to protect local jobs than the last two Democratic Presidents have. In-fact, their champion in the last election sought to increase globalization.

Not to any economically literate person.