Saturday, March 2, 2019

Visa Restrictions And Intellectual Degradation

I am in New York attending the Eastern Economic Association meetings.  I was in an agent-based modeling session in which two partticipants participated by internet because they were both refused visaas to enter the US.  One was from Turkey, which I think is under strict review by the current administration.  The other, a woman from India, working for an American think tank in Toronto, may have simply been a victim of somebody messing up and being too slow in getting the appropriate application forms in on time.  But I am sure the deal on the Turkish participant was new policy.

Their presentations, on self-organizing hierarchies and cryptocurrency dynamics, mostly got through to us. But even with this high-tech ABM crowd there were problems and glitches and occasional disconnctions.  It should not have been this way.

This is just dumb obvious. You arbitrarily keep smart foreigners out of your country, this will lead to intellectual degradation.

Barkley Rosser

4 comments:

Peter T said...

What makes you think the Republican Party cares about intellectual degradation? I'm pretty sure they would feel it a positive benefit.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

I did not claim that the current GOP does so. But until reasonably recently it did largely understand broader national interests, even as it supported dumping on the working class and poor minorities, even as in a more distant past it did not do the latter so much, at least not specifically.

Of course Trump would argue thst his trade war policy helps the US working class, and it does help workers in some very specific protected industries, notably steel, as well as coal that feeds steel, and we know that he really really really wants to help coal, although that sector is simply doomed in the longer run no matter whart he does. But, needless to say, helping out that tiny handful of industries and their workers has nothing to do with maintaining US intellectual leadership, which is clearly tied to maintaining the US's "great" position in the world.

2slugbaits said...

Maybe it's just an example the Trump administration's new commitment to carbon emission abatement by discouraging air travel. Sure. That's it. Or not.

rickstersherpa@msn.com said...

For the Christianist & White Nationalists Party formerly known as Republicans this is a feature, not a bug.