You have to wonder where these ideas originate. It’s almost as if President Trump wants to damage the nation, taking it from the most powerful and desirable nation in the world to a middling power. He seems to be going out of his way to ruin our most important attribute; the factor that makes us so desirable to people in other nations and is also the backbone of our power- our ability to innovate.
Innovation and entrepreneurship have built America’s economy, technology and military capabilities to be the world’s strongest. But Trump appears to be deliberately trying to tear it all down. He started by cutting funding for scientific and medical research, as if scientific ideas just came out of thin air. Our president has no concept of what science is all about and the laborious hours of work that researchers put in to develop and affirm new scientific theories and put them to practical use. Funding is required not only to pay scientists and researchers, but also support staff, and to buy whatever expensive equipment is necessary. Some funding comes from private companies but most of it originates from the federal government. While Trump is reducing federal funding for scientific research, China is expanding its research in all scientific fields in addition to its military.
Trump has cut funding to government scientific agencies and the universities who were doing much of the research work. Not only did this reduction in funds destroy or stop projects currently being done, it also cut off funding for training post-doctorate fellows and young researchers, making future scientific work in America more difficult. China has 4-5 times as many STEM graduates annually as the U.S. and twice as many STEM PhDs. Trump’s actions will make the ratio even worse. And STEM students who were coming to US universities for undergraduate and graduate training has dropped dramatically because of the programs that were terminated.
Now, in addition to cutting funding for scientific equipment and research, Trump wants to charge H-1B immigrants $100,000 dollars to come to the U.S. We need these H-1B immigrants to compensate for the STEM researchers we are not producing ourselves. The vast majority of H- 1B immigrants come from India, with some from China and other nations. We should be paying them to emigrate to the U.S. instead of making it more onerous by charging them a huge sum. This makes no sense at all as did the cuts in funding for scientific research. A majority of scientific patents in the U.S. are obtained by people who were not born in our nation. The leaders of many top technology companies in the U.S. also migrated to the U.S. in the past. Silicon Valley is particularly aggrieved by Trumps new H-1B fees, but all scientific research institutes, universities, technology and scientific companies will have more difficulties producing advances in science, technology and military fields. Trump seems to have no understanding of how the modern world functions and why the U.S. needs all legal immigrants, but especially H-1Bs in STEM and highly specialized fields.
www.robertlevinebooks.com
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Posted at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: H-1B, immigrants, need for STEM graduates., science, technology, Trump payment for H-1B visas
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Political junkie, Vietnam vet, neurologist- three books on aging and dementia. Book on health care reform in 2009- Shock Therapy for the American Health Care System. Book on the need for a centrist third party- Resurrecting Democracy- A Citizen’s Call for a Centrist Third Party published in 2011. Aging Wisely, published in August 2014 by Rowman and Littlefield. Latest book- The Uninformed Voter published May 2020