Welcoming immigrants to the U.S. is out of fashion on the political right these days, even for those who enter the U.S. legally. That’s short-sighted for America’s future prosperity, as this week’s news about the annual Nobel prize winners in the sciences shows again.
Six U.S. residents are among the nine winners in this year’s three Nobel science categories, and three of those six are immigrants. Three U.S.-based professors swept the physics prize, including Michel Devoret, an immigrant from France, and John Clarke, who came to the U.S. from the United Kingdom. They shared the prize with native-born American John Martinis for “quantum mechanical tunnelling.”
Omar Yaghi, an immigrant from Jordan, shared the prize in chemistry with an Australian and a Japanese national. They won for what the Nobel committee called “the development of metal-organic frameworks.”
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Some of our readers will sniff that these are mere anecdotes and say the Trump White House supports legal immigration. Sorry, anecdotes matter because the contributions of individuals matter. And the restrictionists in the White House are trying to shrink even legal immigration too.
See its plan to make H-1B visas too expensive for all but the largest companies, and the campaign to reduce the number of foreign students at U.S. universities. This year’s Nobelists, like winners every year, were attracted to the U.S. in part because of the opportunities at great research universities. One inevitable if hard-to-calculate price of the Trump campaigns against immigration and the U.S. academy is that an unknown number of future potential prize winners will choose to study elsewhere, or return home after they have a degree.
Nobel prizes in the sciences are the result of intellectual capital built over decades of hard work and research. The U.S. will get fewer in the future if the Trump Administration won’t welcome legal immigrants and refugees.
Well well well: “Trump Excludes Generics From Big Pharma Tariff Plan”
Good news for American consumers (patients), but a major Trump reversal on generics and an admission that his tariffs do, in fact, raise US prices.
GMU Econ alum Adam Michel details “six reasons not to extend Obamacare subsidies.” (HT David Henderson)
Critics of this whole terrorist labelling charade, such as Matthew Petti at Reason, explain that: “In practice, that means that a ‘terrorist’ is whoever the executive branch decides to label one.”
While no law dictates such, once people are labelled as terrorists, they appear to no longer be eligible for any sort of due process.
The blow-them-to-smithereens crowd, at this point, will loudly voice their opinion that people in international waters whom we label as terrorists deserve no due process. Vice President Vance asserts: “There are people who are bringing—literal terrorists—who are bringing deadly drugs into our country.”
Which, of course, raises the questions:
- Who labelled them and with what evidence?
- What are their names, and what specifically shows their membership and guilt?
The blow-them-to-smithereens crowd also conveniently ignores the fact that death is generally not the penalty for drug smuggling.
George Will warns of the dangers posed to the world by Vladimir Putin. A slice:
Poland and Romania have experienced harassing drones. In multiple instances, “shadow ships” (worldwide, the “shadow fleet” of ships that conceal their identities and activities numbers about 1,000) have been accused of cutting undersea cables crucial to Europe commercial and military infrastructure.
Jack Nicastro reminds us that government isn’t the only source of economic data.
Prior to the 1927 creation of the Federal Radio Commission (the predecessor of the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC), radio was arguably freer than the printing press. Short-range audio broadcasts not only gave listeners mass entertainment but also provided a way to share and access diverse opinions: socialists, labor unions, religious evangelists, and political populists. Well-publicized problems of interference between frequencies were often engineered politically to bolster calls for regulation, but court rulings were sorting through confusion. Affirming the doctrine of prior use, courts were able to determine de facto ownership in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Roosevelt was determined to silence dissenting voices on the radio. He adeptly manipulated the revolving door of regulators and industry executives and executed behind-the-scenes intrigue using intermediaries to conceal the appearance of censorship while embracing its effects.
By 1933, big broadcasters eagerly aligned themselves with the new administration, and in many cases became regulators themselves. Former FRC commissioner — CBS vice president — Henry A. Bellows was a Democrat and Harvard classmate of FDR’s. In his official role, he promised to reject any broadcast “that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration,” and announced that all stations were “at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration.” Bellows specified that CBS had a duty to support the president, right or wrong, and privately assured presidential press secretary Stephen Early that “the close contact between you and the broadcasters has tremendous possibilities of value to the administration, and as a life-long Democrat, I want to pledge my best efforts in making this cooperation successful.”
