MIT is so global that it can operate only in Boston

by philg

Excerpts from a letter sent to MIT alums by Rafael Reif, the president of the university:

we continue to push hard to bring back to MIT those members of our community, including two undergraduates, who were barred from the US because of the January 27 Executive Order on immigration.

MIT is profoundly global. Like the United States, and thanks to the United States, MIT gains tremendous strength by being a magnet for talent from around the world. More than 40% of our faculty, 40% of our graduate students and 10% of our undergraduates are international.

What the moment demands of us
The Executive Order on Friday appeared to me a stunning violation of our deepest American values, the values of a nation of immigrants: fairness, equality, openness, generosity, courage. The Statue of Liberty is the “Mother of Exiles”; how can we slam the door on desperate refugees? [but we’re not slamming the door! Thanks to Canada’s “everyone America rejects is welcome here” policy, we’re just gently redirecting refugees to Toronto and Vancouver right now]

And if we accept this injustice, where will it end? Which group will be singled out for suspicion tomorrow?

As an immigrant and the child of refugees, I join them, with deep feeling, in believing that the policies announced Friday tear at the very fabric of our society.

We would all like our nation to be safe. I am convinced that the Executive Order will make us less safe.

(Note that MIT is about one mile from where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lived (at taxpayer expense), was educated through high school (at taxpayer expense), waged jihad, and was found guilty (at taxpayer expense, by a jury of impartial peers wearing Boston Strong T-shirts). The Tsarnaev brothers, who killed an MIT campus police officer, were granted residency and citizenship under a political asylum program (because their native land of Russia was purportedly persecuting them for their desire to wage jihad, though both parents ultimately returned to live permanently in this land of persecution (CNN)). With Patriot’s Day in theaters right now, would President Reif have more credibility if he acknowledged that people who wish to “slam the door” may be rational and fair-minded, but yet with a different perspective on the costs and benefits? The above verbiage suggests that there is just one correct way to apply “American values” and that people who disagree with Reif are, well, “deplorable.”)

MIT has about $13 billion in the bank (source) plus a lot of real estate that I don’t think is included in the headline endowment number. If the school is so passionate about working with citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, why not set up a satellite campus in a country that is more geographically convenient, and also more welcoming, for these folks?

MIT already has a satellite campus in Singapore, beyond the reach of the Trumpenfuhrer and the Republican-dominated Reichstag. Unfortunately, “Singapore is not in a position to accept any persons seeking political asylum or refugee status, regardless of their ethnicity or place of origin.” (Singapore Ministry of Home Affairs, 2015)

Why not take bold action and set up an additional satellite campus? It could be as close as Montreal, since Canada will accept anyone whom the U.S. rejects. It could be in the Middle East. NYU is milking cash out of Abu Dhabi, which seems to welcome folks from some of the countries subject to the U.S. ban, but “entry will be refused to citizens of Israel” (see also Wikipedia, which notes that the United Arab Emirates won’t give visas to Libyans under age 40, for example). It could be in a variety of European Union countries, many of which have quite a few residents who are citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan or Yemen.

Readers: If MIT is as global as the president claims, does it make sense to complain about a U.S. government policy? Why not simply work around it?

46 thoughts on “MIT is so global that it can operate only in Boston”

  1. One man’s global magnet is another man’s colonial plunder. If MIT gains tremendous strength by importing talent, aren’t already weak nations losing strength exporting that same talent?

  2. With Crimethink like that how in the hell do you manage to have any Facebook friends at all?

    Seriously, I want to know. I stay off Facebook for my own safety, living in the soon to be independent, People’s Repliblic of California.

    –Ed

  3. Is this intended to be a parody of actual analysis?

    A university of thousands should relocate their entire operation because of a single asinine executive order, executed with no evidence of effectiveness and rolled out horribly?

    Oh, but wait, the Boston bombers would have been prevented by this one. Except that country isn’t banned. Yet another straw man beaten to death.

  4. Scott: I think that your comment is a perfect illustration of the 19th century assumptions that inform President Reif’s email, i.e., that a university in a global age can operate in only one place (though, as noted above, MIT already operates in two places: Cambridge and Singapore). Though the original posting suggests setting up a third campus, in a place that welcomes citizens of Yemen and Libya, for example, you read the posting as suggesting that Cambridge and Singapore be shut down and all of their operations be transferred to this new campus.

  5. philg: It will be good to have international campuses.

    However, may I say that it’s interesting (and a bit disappointing) to note your half-disguised attempt to support the visa ban (or at least not condemn it) by reminding readers about exceptions like Tsarnaev?

    Also, regarding your comment:

    “Singapore is not in a position to accept any persons seeking political asylum or refugee status, regardless of their ethnicity or place of origin.”

    Most grad students/faculty members are not interested in asylum. It’s true that some immigrants (legal or otherwise) do create problems, but it’s not fair to generalize this to a community of scholars.

  6. td: I’m not a Washington-based decision-maker, so generally I seek to understand policies handed down by the central planners, not “support” or “condemn” them. The Tsarnaev brothers are relevant because one would expect that MIT, to be persuasive, would need to explain how the costs associated with asylum-seekers such as the Tsarnaevs don’t justify “slam[ming] the door on desperate refugees”.

  7. MIT only cares about immigrants because they work for it (potentially at less favourable conditions than US citizens) and they produce revenue for it. Immigrant bans will increase costs for MIT. MIT cannot say ‘we want qualified and potentially cheap oversea workers’, hence the spiel, and hence why they would open, or not, a branch someplace other than Boston for purely economic reasons.

  8. In my understanding MIT’s real selling point is its expertise at transforming the buds of its students’ technology ideas into hugely successful businesses.

  9. MIT and all other major universities, cannot go global because doing so means they have to give up US government funded research money that they cannot use overseas. Not only that, they also lose contract with US government research programs that cannot be done overseas: secrecy is one issue. So if they expand globally, the only thing (I think) they can do outside the US is offer classes.

  10. Haven’t you all figured it out yet? Phil is a troll (with an arrogance masking insecurity). He likes to roil people, then “outsmart” them, usually with reduction ad absurdum arguments.

    Hence his ridiculous “question” why MIT doesn’t relocate overseas, in order to avoid an executive order, issued because all refugees are terrorists like the tsarnevs, who were from Russia, since Russians like bananas, because banana peels float in water?

    Most of his stories have the punch-line of him supposedly foiling some strawman who cannot grasp his reductio ad absurdum “logic.”

  11. @PatriotAct, yes we know this about Phil. But this blog is far more enlightening vs. CNN, no?

  12. @PatriotAct: agreed, “troll” is the most charitable term one could use to describe Phil, at least as far as this blog is concerned.

  14. The risk to Americans from terrorism is very small. The Tsarnaev brothers committed three of 14,196 (U.S.) murders in 2013. The President’s Executive Order inconveniences tens of thousands of people including American citizens and institutions such as MIT. The very small risk from terrorism does not justify the inconvenience, but even if one thought it did the Executive Order does not address that risk because it does not include several countries where past experience and current terror activity suggests the (still very small) risk is much higher. Indeed, the Executive Order appears carefully calibrated to maximize inconvenience to certain Muslim people while carefully avoiding damage to American business interests including President Trump’s. The stated purpose of halting U.S. refugee resettlement programs is American security and to give time to institute “extreme vetting”. However, the risk to Americans is very small and refugees already undergo “extreme vetting”. If halting U.S. refugee resettlement is so obviously the right policy, why must it be instituted under false pretenses? Even if one believes that refugee resettlement programs should be halted, the way the Executive Order does so is simply wrong. Tens of thousands of refugees invested their time and resources into these programs on the understanding that if they qualified they would be admitted to the U.S. Some in the later stages of this process have already made significant life changes in preparation for the move. These are people who through no fault of their own have already suffered through horrific circumstances and/or provided valuable services to the United States. Pulling the rug out from under them after enticing them to invest their resources into a U.S. program represents an unconscionable abrogation of promises made by the U.S. government. The most charitable explanation for the Executive Order is that it is intended to put Muslim people in general on notice that they are subject to arbitrary and capricious adverse action by the U.S. government and give people who hate Muslims something to cheer about. This understanding is entirely consistent with statements made by President Trump during his campaign. Using the U.S. immigration system for this unconstitutional political purpose represents a breathtaking abuse of state power.

    Dr. Reif represents an institution directly inconvenienced by the Executive Order. It seems entirely appropriate that he push back against it. The posting proposes that MIT use its endowment to go into the refugee assistance business overseas but does not adequately explain how this is consistent with and would advance its core mission. The implication that Dr. Reif should shut up about the Executive Order or refugees if he is unwilling to do so is as ridiculous as me suggesting that a certain blogger should shut up about dongles if he is unwilling to build his own computer system.

  15. Most good writing creates an emotional response. I don’t know whether Phil’s motivation is to be inflammatory or to genuinely investigate the validity of the ideas he presents because I’m not psychic. I’d suspect it’s a bit of both.

    The least that can be said is this blog is an effective propaganda machine for the current administration. This post and the ‘Canada’ post imply that the uproar about the Muslim ban is misguided because there are common sense solutions to get around it. This is propaganda and misdirection 101.

  16. philg: An academic institution doesn’t have to justify its values because of one bad neighbor, or provide a quantitative cost benefit analysis when it comes to a country’s obligations given the humanitarian crisis. We shouldn’t stretch our meagre resources, but are we only calculators and robots?

    Putting a ban on visiting scholars and graduate students based on their country of origin (or, rather, religion) is crossing the limit. There’s nothing wrong if a university or company (Google, Amazon, Tesla, etc.) raises an alarm on this excessiveness and naked discrimination.

    Ideally, your university letter would cover all the different view points on the subject and placate the agnostics. But is this the time to do that, when students on campuses are getting singled out?

    You say that you do not condemn or condone policies, but your posts like this one create an opposite impression, unfortunately. Thank you for your thoughts on this. I hope you would reconsider your approach.

  17. The executive order is relatively narrow and limited, and provides room for exceptions. Implementation was quick and messy, but it’s less of mess than the implementation of the healthcare changes.

    I find Phil’s blog useful. I do not think he’s a troll. I find him more willing to tolerate a variety of ideas and think through things with a low level of personal political ideology and fear than many other people. I think his posts try to force different, practical interpretations to many issues. In the process he highlights the political bias that many smart people cannot disentangle themselves from. Apparently they are captive to their ideology and too sensitive to tolerate any thought experiments.

  18. The Trump travel ban does not prohibit visitors from Saudi Arabia; given the number of actual terrorist attackers who have come to the US from that country, plus their widespread and astronomical financial support for Islamo-fascist causes around the world, the current travel ban makes sense to me only as a means for Trump to satisfy the ‘letter of the law’ in keeping his campaign promise, while trying not to affect anything in the business world.

    Let’s see if he follows through on lifting the ban after the stated time period to, as he said in the campaign, “figure out what’s going on”. My guess is that he really does want to do the things he said he would, but that the appearance of doing them, to satisfy his voter base, is the important thing, not the actual long term consequences of what are probably expensive ineffective policies (like building a huge continental fence, or putting up trade protection tariffs that don’t increase US technical superiority).

    I think we should offer wholesale priority immigration to all the management and employees of Chinese companies who have stolen US technology. Let’s get our IP back!

  19. > Why not simply work around it?

    Because that wouldn’t help further the program of electing a new people.

  20. Philg has:
    1. Been an outspoken critic of MIT’s moribund and self-serving business model for years. (I recall a story where he insisted on paying back all his students for a lecture)
    2. I can’t speak for Philg, but one of the things that seems to be pushing people towards supporting Trump is that he’s embraced the idea that American institutions should serve Americans first. The idea that governmental and educational institutions are currently run to serve their employees and foreigners is not a difficult conclusion to reach.
    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/12/new-report-shows-dependence-us-graduate-programs-foreign-students
    I think Phil’s point is a good one: if they want to be international, why not really be international?
    As for me: what difference does it make if we have the best universities in the world if we don’t actually educate any Americans in them? (If the answer has to do with the next Facebook having slightly better nerds to pick from, then why should I care?)

  21. Finding logical fallacies == trolling.
    Where do we go from here?

    Unclear, but my best guess is it has to do with feelings, literally shaking and the collective shaming of unacceptable human beings. Perhaps pointing out one’s PTSD as well.

  22. I think it’s unfair to call Philip a troll. During the Cold War some people called themselves “anti-anti-Communists”: they didn’t support Communism themselves, they were just criticizing anti-Communists. Similarly, I’d describe Philip as being a critic of anti-Trumpism: he thinks his liberal friends are over-reacting. I don’t agree with Philip at all (I think he’s indulging in wishful thinking, like a lot of Republican and libertarian Trump supporters), but I still find it useful to get his perspective.

    Also, just wanted to say thanks to Neal for his well-reasoned and reasonable contributions to the discussion.

    Regarding Trump’s ban on admission of refugees and people from several Muslim-majority countries: I think what Trump and his supporters don’t get is that the battle of ideas is just as important as border security. Philip’s a web pioneer; he should know as well as anyone that the Internet has made it far easier for novel ideas to spread.

    Regarding the relationship between consent and power:

    … real power is always something far greater than military power alone. A balance of power is not a balance of military power alone: it is, rather, a balance in which military power is one element. Even in its crudest aspect, power represents a subtle and intimate combination of force and consent. No stable government has ever existed, and no empire has ever become established, except with an immensely preponderant measure of consent on the part of those who were its subjects. That consent may be a half-grudging consent; it may be a consent based in part on awe of superior force; it may represent love, or respect, or fear, or a combination of the three. Consent, in any case, is the essential ingredient in stable power–more so than physical force, of which the most efficient and economical use is to increase consent.

    Louis Halle, The Cold War as History (1967).

    And what is the narrative that the US has pursued up to this point in history? Joseph Heath:

    Incidentally, I happen to agree that some women who wear a niqab are doing it in order to engage in some kind of symbolic rejection or resistance to Western values. But here’s the thing… I don’t care. I am completely unperturbed. I have lots of colleagues who go railing against “the West” and its values all the time. That doesn’t bother me either. Why? Because of my serene self-confidence as a Westerner. Simply put, I believe that the basic structure of liberal-democratic societies, which includes a market economy, welfare state, individual rights, electoral democracy, and separation of church and state, obviously and self-evidently dominates all known alternatives (“dominates” in this context means “is better in every respect”). The fact that people want to flail around a bit before accepting the inevitable is not something that troubles me very deeply. The ability to tolerate niqabs, hijabs, turbans, or whatever else people want to wear, is a sign of the profound strength of liberal democratic societies.

    Here in Canada, we’re willing to admit immigrants and refugees because we still have confidence in our society and its institutions, we believe that newcomers will find them attractive, and we’re confident that we can assimilate them. In the US, a large section of US public opinion no longer has this confidence; I would count Philip among them. Hence Trump.

  23. The focus on terrorism and crime in the context of immigration and refugees is a big problem. I don’t care if these people shit gold and are perfectly law abiding geniuses. They are foreigners and we don’t need them. This MIT guy clearly cares more about foreigners than his fellow Americans. We already have too many foreigners. It’s going to take 80 years to assimilate the ones we have here now.

    On top of this, the country is on a course for extremely dangerous overpopulation. It is overpopulated now. Who visits india and thinks, Gee the population density here seems like a great idea. Let’s cram 600+ million people into the USA.

  24. Georgia Tech (my alma mater) will educate them in Metz, France and to some extent in Ireland, Singapore, China, and Paris.

    Seriously, Ga Tech is one of the great bargains in tech education. Sadly, the football program will quickly make you a basketball fan.

    As to philg’s viewpoints, it IS his blog and we are volunteer visitors, so it’s hard to get way out of joint over how he runs it. We are even warned at the beginning to expect only occasional nuggets. It is actually much better than that. Thanks for persisting, philg

  26. @theotherdonald: By the numbers, for Americans, the only causes of death that really make any significant difference are diet/lifestyle things and cancer, the rest seem to not be worth worrying about. It may be irrational to be worried about it at all, but as for Terrorists vs. deer:
    The deer don’t seem to want to kill me for just being me/disagreeing with them about the relationship between god, morality, and law.
    The deer, even given the chance, are unlikely to try to take my female relatives as sex slaves/chattel.
    The deer, lacking moral sense, are not expected to know right from wrong. In any case, for one to be hit by a car seems to be a legitimate accident.

  27. I got the letter from President Reif too.

    I reached a somewhat different conclusion.

    He states the Executive Order resulted in two (though maybe one) student stuck abroad.

    Wikipedia reports MIT is comprised of 11,400 students (grad and undergrad).

    lets say 2 have been temporarily inconvenienced in their pursuit of a degree.

    MIT, being selective, has likely rejected 9/10 of its applicants.

    So lets say 90k have been permanently inconvenienced (i.e. barred) in their pursuit of an MIT degree.

    And don’t tell me the 11k selected were the 11k most meritorious applicants in the file. Standards appear less than consistent.

    So the Admissions Committee has caused oh, say, 45 thousand times the damage as The Donald.

    Ban the Admissions Commitee!

    Who writes the anguished letters for the rejects? The Asian Americans, the autistic, the unwell-rounded geniuses.

    The emoting, innumeracy, and virtue signalling of that letter was an embarrassment to the institution.

  28. @Neal once again echoes Liberal talking points and its associated faulty analysis.

    @Neal equates murder by terrorists with murders by more common causes. Yet, the Tsarnaev terrorist murders were the subject of a major motion picture this year. Why? Because by definition terror has an asymmetric impact on a population greater than the act itself.

    While @Neal asks us to believe he is able to perform proper risk assessment about terrorist threats, I would like to point out his fallacy that since the risk wasn’t completely mitigated no mitigation should be done. Was the risk cut by 25%? 50%? Those seem like reasonable reductions to me. What do we know about Saudi Arabia not making the list – maybe they provide more pre-travel intelligence to the U.S. about their citizens going on foreign travel.

    @Neal provides a straw-man that the ban was to protect Trumps business interests – no evidence – just more Liberal B.S. He then uses that straw man to claim the travel ban was created under false pretenses.

    While it’s unfortunate that foreigners were “inconvenienced,” let’s toughen up as a country and stop the (mostly crocodile) “tears.”

  29. The colleges and universities are living in a self indulgent fantasy world. Every year that I give money to my college, a small New England liberal arts institution i soon thereafter feel like a fool. This year i received a handwritten note from one “Molly” thanking me for my gift, which enabled her to “study” in Nepal. It probably never crossed young Molly’s mind or my college that i don’t get up to go to work every day to send Molly to Nepal. My house cleaner, a Tibetan woman, fled Nepal and is now trying to get the rest of her family out of there — which sadly will give the Mollies of the world a bit less to study. Anyway, when the Trumpenfuhrer presents his tax plan it will include taxing university endowments so the party will be over and the billions that compound tax free will be used not to send Molly to Nepal but that Gramps and Granny don’t have to eat cat food in their golden years.

  30. Russil’s argument is reasonably persuasive. If we are in a PR war and our brand is “all immigrants welcome” then maybe we have to defend the brand despite the changed circumstances since the Statue of Liberty was built (e.g., immigrants today can collect welfare for decades rather than work; some immigrants and their kids want to wage jihad; real estate inflation and traffic jams are sucking the joy out of life for many native-born Americans). But that’s not the argument we hear. Advocates for immigration don’t say “it is worth the trillions in welfare and the occasional jihad”. They say “there is no cost in dollars or lives and you are stupid/racist if you want to look at the cost.”

  31. Thanks, Philip. I agree that “you are stupid/racist” arguments are not helpful. Perhaps something like the draft State Department dissent cable would be what you’re looking for?

    Given the near-absence of terror attacks committed in recent years by Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, Libyan, Somali, Sudanese, and Yemeni citizens who are in the U.S. after entering on a visa, this ban will have little practical effect in improving public safety.

    If this ban will not prevent terror attacks from occurring, what will it do?

    It will immediately sour relations with these seven countries, as well as much of the Muslim world, which sees the ban as religiously-motivated. The governments of these countries are important allies and partners in the fight against terrorism, regionally and globally. By alienating them, we lose access to the intelligence and resources needed to fight the root causes of terror abroad, before an attack occurs within our borders.

    It will increase anti-American sentiment. When the 220 million citizens of these couuntries lose the opportunity to travel to the U.S. overnight, hostility towards the United States will grow. Instead of building bridges to these societies through formal outreach and exchanges and through informal people-to-people contact, we send the message that we consider all nationals of these countries to be an unacceptable security risk. Almost one-third of these countries’ combined populations are children under the age of 15; there is no question that their perception of the United States will be heavily colored by this ban. We are directly impacting the attitudes of current and future leaders in these societies–including those for whom this may be a tipping point towards radicalization.

    A more concrete example: Trump’s travel ban threatens U.S. partnership with Iraq against Islamic State.

  33. I’m deeply offended about Saudi Arabia rejecting my visa application. I told them I just want to walk around Mecca and take some pictures, but no go. I hope my fellow Americans don’t find out about this state of affairs. It might sour relations and lead some to terror attacks.

  34. The Tsarnaev’s committed at least 6 murders. The 3 killed during the bombing, Officer Collier, another officer who died of his injuries 1 year later, and Tamerlan run over by his brother. In addition, Tamerlan is suspected in the death of Brendan Mess, Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken, so that makes 9. This is a pretty considerable death toll, but in addition, 14 people lost limbs in the bombings and 280 were injured either at the bomb sites or later in Watertown. Plus million of dollars in property damage. And of course remember that the brothers had made more bombs and were on the way to New York to kill more people (plus they surely were planning to kill the owner of the car that they had carjacked) when they were captured. This is a pretty significant crime wave for just 2 guys so I think their crime deserved the notoriety that it gained.

    It would have been bad enough if they had “only” killed 3 innocent strangers but in fact their crimes were much worse. It disgusts me that Neal attempts to minimize the very real and (literally) life shattering impact of the Boston bombings in an attempt to score cheap political points.

  35. >They say “there is no cost in dollars or lives and
    >you are stupid/racist if you want to look at the cost.”

    I am certainly much more sympathetic to this complaint since my youngest has gone off to college. She is more liberal than you (philg) or me but is nonetheless astonished at some of the things her peers say and has even expressed an occasional fear of speaking her mind lest she end up on the wrong side of the PC divide.

    Surely though, working out reasonably correct policy positions (which also requires due consideration of the benefits that I’ve heard you acknowledge right here in this blog) is more important than demonstrating how wrong “they” are (acknowledging the other Donald’s point that it is your blog and you can if you want to).

  37. “By alienating them, we lose access to the intelligence and resources needed to fight the root causes of terror abroad, before an attack occurs within our borders.”

    So let me get this straight: We need to allow in citizens of the currently prohibited nations so that we can derive intelligence about their own citizens who may end up in the United States and commit terror attacks. We must let them in so we can prevent them from coming in. Nice!

    The State department really drank the cool-aid. All we have to do is show the world how nice and caring we are and all these attacks will stop.

  38. Craig:

    > The State department really drank the cool-aid. All we have to do is show the world how nice and caring we are and all these attacks will stop.

    All _what_ attacks? Who was the last foreign jihadi to do damage in the US, and where did he come from?

    Bonus points: who, when, and where from, was the last foreign jihadi from one of the seven banned countries?

  40. It was 1989. The Fatwa had been declared by Khomeini, the Ayatollah of Iran, that Salman Rushdie must be murdered for writing his book, The Satantic Verses. This was long before The Internet was the central form of social media, but at MIT we had other channels.

    A letter appeared in The Tech , from a Turkish student who was the head of the MIT Islamic Students Association, with a long rambling explanation of how deeply horribly hurt all Muslims were by the book, and how he wanted “justice to be swiftly done”, though he menacingly left unspecified as to what the exact punishment for exercising free speech ought to be.

    A few students responded to the letter, clearly seeing the writing on the wall and expressing outrage that such a call to assassination was even allowed to be printed in the student paper , but most people tried to be “fair” and somehow grant that nobody had a right to suggest any Muslims think about their religion in any way unapproved by their Islamo-fascist society, and certainly they should be able to murder people who offended them by somehow. To do otherwise would be simply intolerant.

    Another letter soon appeared in the letters section of The Tech, this time from two Iranian nuclear engineering students (ironic, no?) , who declared that since Rushdie had, in their words, “murdered Mohahammed”, that he must die.

    Kudos to The Tech for publishing these letters. I don’t know if it was in the guise of “tolerance”, or if some astute student editor realized that the best way to sound the alarm of rising Islamo-fascism was to let people see that educated people from these cultures regarded it as normal and proper to explain to us Westerners that anyone who would critically examine Islam should be killed as a matter of common sense and decency.

    That is the power and promise of a liberal education! Actually listening to other viewpoints, instead of assuming that everyone else, below the superficial differences, really thinks and believes just like you. In this case however, most people didn’t really get the benefits of their liberal education until a dozen years later when the airplanes full of travelers smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

  41. More than 40% of our faculty, 40% of our graduate students and 10% of our undergraduates are international.

    More jobs that Americans won’t do (at the price that MIT is willing to pay). Even decades ago, I experienced the joy of being taught by teaching assistants whose English was barely comprehensible. At least my parents weren’t paying $65k/year for that privilege like today’s undergrads.

    Note the difference in % between profs and grad students (whom MIT has to pay) and undergrads (who do the paying). If internationalism is so great, why aren’t 40% of MIT undergrads also “international” too?

  42. Craig: “So let me get this straight: We need to allow in citizens of the currently prohibited nations so that we can derive intelligence about their own citizens who may end up in the United States and commit terror attacks. We must let them in so we can prevent them from coming in. Nice!”

    It’s not just the 220 million people in the countries affected by the ban. In total there’s more than 1 billion Muslims, from Egypt to Turkey (a NATO member!) to Indonesia, about the same as the population of China. Antagonize a billion people here, a billion people there, and pretty soon you’re left with no friends and allies, only vassals and enemies.

    I was reading a paper on economic populism in Latin America. The authors, Dornbusch and Edwards, talk about how policymakers ignored or hand-waved away external constraints, but in the end their policies failed because of them. Likewise, in foreign policy, you always need to be thinking about power, and ultimately, power — the ability to get other people to do what you want — depends on legitimacy and consent, not force alone. (If you have to keep beating your children to get them to behave, you’re doing something wrong.)

    And it’s not just American foreign policy that will suffer; domestic security is likely to suffer as well. In the Internet age, the battle of ideas is just as important as border security. There’s 3.3 million American Muslims, and it’s not difficult to imagine the fear, anger, and resentment they must be feeling. It’s far easier to assimilate minorities and win their loyalty when you’re not treating them like enemies. (Up to this point the US has been far more successful than Europe in integrating Muslims.)

  44. Russil,

    Having been a guest in many predominately Muslim countries, I have little concern that this temporary prohibition is anything more than a blip on the radar for their citizens.

    I would also have to believe that their perception of the United States would be dominated more by our current conflicts involving Drone strikes, or our policies towards Israel.

    I guess though if Trump would just rescind this policy there will be “Peace for our time.”

    The good news is that the demand for immigration to the U.S. has been quite inelastic.

  45. Phil: you are right when you say that there is a problem or perceived problem with immigration in the USA and that the labeling of people who raise these issues as racists does not address the problem.

    And as you are right that immigration today is not equal to the one, say, in the 60’s, given the capability of accessing welfare, for example, it is also correct to point out that this ban does not address any of those issues except to play for the fear of terrorism and the latent fear of islamization.

    But what perturbs many is that this order has the hallmark of strongman populism. It is put forth as a demonstration of force with little regard for the actual power of the solution it pretends to be. In fact, as any populist, it’s a simplistic solution that addresses more the emotions than the actual problems: as many have said, many terrorists are coming from other countries. We all know – but I’ll punish myself if this turns out to be wrong – that Saudi Arabia is never going to figure in such ban. And it’s not because of Trump’s interests, but because of US interests – it’s called realpolitik, a word popularized into White House parlance by one refugee.

    We also know that if someone is bent on committing acts of terrorism, they can easily fly to Canada and cross the border – or will there also be a border wall up there.

    While many on the left can’t voice that there’s a problem, there’s also little substantiated argumentation from the right that this ban can produce any (or even some) results.

  46. Craig:

    Your Ohio State guy doesn’t really qualify. Muslim, Somali refugee, naturalized citizen, college graduate. In country for two years. Crashed a car and attacked some random students with a butcher knife.

    That’s a person with criminally severe psychiatric problems, but it doesn’t sound like a jihadi who came to America with the intent of causing harm. Or even like a person who made a plan more than a few hours in advance.

    Any other examples from the “oh-so-scary seven”?

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