Re:When a College Takes on American Poverty
by red_admiral on Sunday June 03, 2018 @01:50PM
(#17220707)
America might have been embracing immigration more, and for longer, but the Britain you have today too is to a large extent a consequence of embracing immigration post-WWII as we needed a workforce to rebuild our country. See "windrush generation" (more recently: "windrush scandal" over how poorly some of them have been treated) . If you're living in the UK you might have heard about it on the news recently (I say with typical British understatement).
Immigration was certainly good for our economy too.
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the UK university system (and high tech economy, see DeepMind) is extremely strong. Having a lot of immigrants makes it attractivr for other high skilled immigrants to come and live.
That embrace of immigration is perhaps the main reason the US has had a strong economy. Immigrants fuel the US university system, the strongest in the world, and the tech economy, which feed off each other. And accepting immigrants has led to a cosmopolitan feel in the US, which makes high-skilled immigrants want to come here. That is a big reason why New York is a finance capital.
The United States is now destroying its unique brainpower advantage by destroying immigration (basically in pursuit of political power by one party). It's a disaster for the US. But the smart immigrants will now go to other countries for university and start companies in other countries. It's a huge opportunity for other countries.