Buchholz math team wins 16th national championship

Gene, I think it underlines how America benefits from immigration and in fact always has. After the influx in the late 19th and early 20th century which was clamped down on at about 1920, Jews were over represented in the sciences, medicine, etc with allowed Europeans like Germans escaping the Nazi’s later in the 1930s.

We have been the world leader in higher education and that has drawn the best here to study and mostly stay. One assumes that was the path for many of the families who’s kids now populate this math team. Unfortunately, the hysteria over immigration has rebounded to those types of immigrants for whom it is much harder now to get in. In Florida DeSantis specifically cut off Chinese attendance at our universities, probably the largest group of foreign students and assets who will now stay home – China has built an impressive web of universities over the last 20-30 years – or go elsewhere. This is America’s loss and we are now losing that long lived dominance. There has been some rebound since Biden took office but once people look elsewhere, some will never look back.

“American higher education has long prided itself on being a brilliant beacon, attracting generations of students from around the globe.

They come for education and for opportunity. Many, having established ties to America, return home to take roles in academe, business, or government. No country has trained more foreign leaders than the United States.

Others stay, becoming a critical part of the American talent infrastructure. They fill our faculty offices, our laboratories, our boardrooms. One in five entrepreneurs who founded start-ups in the United States is an immigrant — and three-quarters of them first came to America as students. While they were enrolled, they brought diversity and millions in revenue to their campuses.

But that beacon, bright for decades, has begun to dim. The Trump administration, with its America First policies and bellicose rhetoric, sent the message that foreign students were not welcome. Then the Covid-19 pandemic shut the country’s borders. Last year’s decline in international students — the U.S. government reported an 18-percent drop in overall student-visa holders and a 72 percent decrease in new enrollments in 2020 — is without precedent.

America’s light was already flickering, however. Today’s students have more options than ever before, around the world and at home. Like their U.S. classmates, they question the cost of college and the return on an American degree. They worry about whether they’d be safe in this country. And for many international students, it’s tough to imagine a future in America because immigration policy gives little preference to those who study here….”

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2021/08/03/fading-beacon-why-america-is-losing-international-students