Students name: Mai Phng Thy

ID: BAIU09211
Group: 01
Subject: World Economic Geography

How to Lose the Brain Race

Summary:
Senator Dianne Feinstein asserts that she is suggesting a "balanced" approach to immigration
policy. She simply reasserts what her two provisions do: firstly, allows a large stream of
agricultural workers and secondly, doubles the fee for foreign students applying to American
universities.
Steven Clemons and Michael Lind argue that Senator Feinsteins additions to the immigration
reform package "sent a message to the rest of the world: send us your brawn, not your brains."
In fact, Senator Feinstein supports a balanced policy that including an agriculture workers
program and increasing numbers of high-tech visas. She sponsored a bipartisan amendment
providing undocumented agriculture workers with an opportunity to earn a green card if they
continue working in agriculture because the agriculture industry cannot today hire the
American workers it needs. This program would provide them an opportunity to come out of
the shadows. She also supports a program to allow foreign students to work in science,
technology, engineering and math. But government should ensure that American students get
the training they need to compete in these fields. So she proposed increasing the cost of the
visas, with the funds going for scholarships for American students.
However, the fact is that the fees involved are not the only deterrents - but the complicated and
intimidating student visa interview process for students from non-visa waivered nations is

unpredictable and frequently demeaning. Doubling these fees, which the Senator argues will
help fund American scholarships, only aggravates America's image problem in the world. A
balanced policy would involve doing much more to remove the speed bumps to smart, balanced
people coming to this country and either eventually legally immigrating or going back to their
own countries with some of America's DNA.
Give your support or argument on Steven Clemonss opinion about losing the brain race.
Answer:
Assume that I am the U.S.s citizen. I will disagree with Steven Clemons for some
reasons:
First of all, as I have known, in California, the practice has been for many years for the
University of California to offer college education to foreign students over qualified California
natives. This is always touted by University of California as going after the most qualified.
University of California, in it is rush to remain one of the top university systems in the world.
Moreover, California Universities derive higher income from foreign students so their
preference is to have a higher percentage of foreign students.
Secondly, the other issue is defining what benefit we derive from these foreign students. We're
losing manufacturing and engineering jobs as they go overseas. There will be a decrease of over
300,000 software and computer programming jobs over the next seven years as Microsoft,
IBM, and so on lay off educated workers by the tens of thousands in the U.S and hire half again
as many workers at new campuses in India, Taiwan, and China.
What we need is a system that encourages people to come to the US when there are jobs to fill on both ends of the education continuum - in a legal, relatively easy way.
In addition, the DNA that Steven Clemons talks about foreign students taking home with them
is too often intellectual property that companies here in the U.S paid to develop. They take that
overseas and use it as an advantage to compete with the few remaining the U.S companies.

So rather than looking at the older model of the U.Ss university as a skill draw, maybe we
should look at the U.S schools as a marketable export.
If we're training future off shore competition, then maybe we should look at our schools as
profit centers and charge whatever the market will bear.
Finally, in this case, Senator Feinstein would be correct. I rarely agree with her, and my hope
would be that the extra fees would be used for deserving students here in the U.S.

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