4.29.2010

Illegal Education

It's interesting that, despite the general trend of the long arc of history to bend toward justice (forgive me, Dr. King, for butchering your beautiful words), how generally xenophobic we're becoming. Take, for instance, this missive I received on international export laws and how they apply to international students. My international classmates are already having an incredibly difficult time finding internships in the US. It's not that the process of sponsoring an intern is that complicated, and it's not that it's expensive. Someone explained to me--in a more approving way than I'd have mustered--that it's because they use internships as funnels for employment, and to hire a non-citizen for a position, you have to prove that there was no qualified US citizen that you could have hired instead.

Frankly, I'm a fan of US citizens being employed, but I think it's pretty malicious to lure students here with scholarships and the promise of world-class educations, educate them with US resources, then refuse to hire them. Ultimately it hurts the US most, by choking out talented knowledge workers, and by wasting resources on a person who'll eventually be forced to leave the country for work (thus never paying back into the tax base). Even factoring out all moral arguments, it's fiscally irresponsible to treat international students and applicants that way.

Add to that, international students will probably no longer set foot in Arizona, since they can be stopped and detained until the Feds can prove their legal status on the basis of an assumption by a state or local police officer. Nope, no racial profiling going on there!

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