What if Sergey Brin Were Denied a Visa?

[Crossposted from the HPR blog]

The NYT came out with Part IV of its "Remade in America" series. It's a great series, full of the cool graphics that the NYT does so well. But the thesis of the piece, I suggest, is rather obvious (at least to anyone who's walked around Harvard's campus lately). Simply: immigration really, really helps America.

“Every American I’ve talked to says: ‘Dude, it’s ridiculous that we’re not doing everything we can to keep you in the country. We need people like you!’ ” he said.

“The people of America get it,” he added. “And in a matter of time, I think current lawmakers are going to realize how dumb they’re being.”

Immigrants like Mr. Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs.

To be fair, we're talking about the easiest cases -- immigrants who have enter our skilled labor forces vis a vis Ivy League schools. But in some ways that's the point: these are easy cases.

America's ability to attract the brightest students from around the world remains one of its greatest advantages -- one that distinguishes it, finally, from other great powers at their senescence. Britain never had the same universalist appeal that America has. It couldn't. For Britain, an old and rich cultural-racial heritage made the assimilation of immigrants fraught with difficulties; it's complicated, but the bottom line was that the darker your skin, the less British you could ever be.

That's not the case in America. America was founded on virgin soil; there was no antecedently established culture (well, almost none...). So we were constituted on a set of ideas -- ones that, conceivably, anyone from any part of the world could aspire to. I think this aspirational quality is key. It means that our ability to attract diverse and talented students isn't just an artifact of our wealth; it's built into our source code, into the way that we were founded. It's because our national identity isn't predicated on a cultural heritage but on ideals. America is a framework not a race.

This is something that's often neglected both by the "United States is in decline" crowd and the "I'm a real American" crowd. Both groups misunderstand how the founding of our country makes us unique; and they both undervalue the material advantages this confers, Google Inc. as a great example.

Of course, you could ask, Should we be skimming off the most talented students from developing countries? Maybe not. But if they want to come, surely we should take them.