The mental model many people seem to have is "foreigners will pay us exorbitant amounts of tuition for a prestigious diploma, and education isn't actually valuable so we might as well send them back home".

And it's only mildly surprising people think this way. The median American does seem to go through an educational system that takes all their money and gives them a diploma without actually providing valuable expertise in anything. But the experience is exactly the opposite for the best immigrants, who only sometimes pay much tuition (PhDs in STEM in particular very rarely pay with anything other than their labor as teaching/research assistants), and gain enormously valuable expertise. It's completely asinine, but perhaps not so surprising.

The median American 25 or older has less than an associates (2-year) degree.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educatio...

What’s funny is that my (foreign) wife got her masters at a state school in the US with a US scholarship and was sent back after she graduated.

Many US scholarship comes from private money. So having a scholarship doesn't automatically grant citizenship or people would abuse the system and limits would need to be placed on students studying.

I don't think there is any country in the world that gives citizenship based on a grant. These people just want a chance at finding a relevant job in the US using their newly earned skills.

This is a weird take considering most states offer tuition breaks for people that live in that state. If this is really how people felt about these schools you would think they would be boycotting their mere existence considering they cost a lot of state tax dollars to fund.

I mean, its a complicated and slow process. State funding of colleges has been on decline for ages -- every time a recession hits the university system gets another budget cut but its rare to see the cuts restored when the economy recovers.

Meanwhile the median voter is probably more excited about college sports than college degrees.

As a citizen of the US, I like having a vibrant tech economy here in the US and I love working with brilliant people, so I would like it if everyone educated in our world class universities could stay here if they wanted. Also as a citizen of the US who likes stability in the US, I like that the children of elites all over the world come to the US for university and many return to their native countries with a fondness for the US from their time in our universities.

As a citizen of the world, I think there's tremendous value in distributing knowledge and our best ideals all over the world.

Even more confusing is why we then have 100k immigrants that are randomly selected with unknown skills from all over the world to come here and take up things like driving taxis. All the while we have labor shortages for basic things like nannies and baby sitters.

How many families are going to leave their child with a uber driver?

If developed nations with top tier education systems attract the best talent from the developing world and retain them all, who is going to develop and grow the economy, workforce and consumer markets of the developing world?

what boggles my mind even more is US lets people from other visa categories so easily without even vetting but creates so many hurdles for students & tech-workers who definitely contribute more positively to US economy. Take marriage green card route for example. Green card marriage is a widely known term now. Similarly, refugee visa is exploited a lot. I know people who received refugee visa by faking their stories. In some cases they are not even from the country they are claiming to be. All those people who game those visas come and take one or the other form of government support whereas students and tech workers only contribute to the economy.

This is precisely what the Fulbright scholarship program is for:

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

University system is an export. We can't export it if they stay.

What do you mean we send them away? Should we hold them against their will? If they want to stay there are ways to stay.

I am not sure if you are responding with actual information or just anecdata. There are hundreds of thousands of students who actually want to work in the US but are unable to (and are sent back) because of H1B Visa lotteries and archaic green card processes.

I'm not saying the US immigration system is perfect but there were apparently 855,000 new naturalized citizens in 2021. Somebody is figuring it out.

Also- the US doesn't owe everybody a citizenship.

Right, but this number is very low compared to Canada's 250k, considering the USA has 10x the population of Canada

167k for Australia (US has almost 13x the population of Australia)

Majority of them are family based as opposed to employment based, so your point is invalid

How much of a majority?

Roughly 14% of the naturalized citizens were in the employment category.

https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship-resource-center/naturaliza...

So 119,700? That's a lot. Does that count naturalized citizens that came for employment but brought their family?

No, relatively speaking, it's not a lot. Yeah, it's a big number in a vacuum, but comparatively it's dwarfed by other countries we should want to compete with.

There's over a million foreigners in school.

I had a friend with a CS degree ask if I would marry her because she didn't want to go back to China and couldn't get an H1B.

119,700 isn't a lot in the context of overall immigration and the number of immigrants who come here to study and for employment. The number also includes the immediate family of the recipient (spouse + children), which would be about 2/3 or 1/2 of the 119,700.