STEM graduate education foreign students/faculty, and indirect costs

The Trump Administration’s slashing of indirect costs for federal grants for university-based research to a maximum of 15% may especially threaten STEM research and academic departments.  It may drive many foreign-born research and faculty in STEM to go to another country.

About 45% of STEM Masters and 46% of STEM PhDs awarded by US institutions go to international students on temporary visas. 29% of full-time science and engineering faculty in U.S. universities are foreign-born. 49% of U.S.-trained postdocs were born overseas.

Steve Hsu (@hsu_steve) writes on X: The [indirect cost] cuts will harm overall university budgets, but the main harm will be to very expensive STEM activities on campus, which require large IC charges to fund.

Building new labs, renovating old labs, hiring staff to deal with real regulatory and compliance requirements, etc. all require additional funds from ICs. Existing grants do not cover any of these costs which are very large and very real….Overall this is a huge win for China because the appeal of working as a scientist at a US university is significantly diminished as the available resources decrease.

Here is an article saying that direct costs are immune from Executive Branch interference.

White South Afrikaners as refugees to the U.S.

President Trump has issued an Executive Order classifying South African Afrikaners as a specifically designated population for refugee status. This might be the first time an advanced western country provides formal aid to a group of white persons intimately associated with writing, not long ago, racist laws of oppression against non-white persons.

What we see in greater deportation activity

The news of the day is action by the Trump Administration to crush any resistance of countries (mainly Latin American) to flights from the U.S. carrying deported persons back to their country of origin. A blow up with Colombia lasted less than 24 hours.

However, a development with much more serious implications is the plan by the administration to expand “expedited removal.”

Expedited removal is located in Section 235(b)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This law authorizes immigration officers to summarily remove certain noncitizens without further hearing or review, thus by-passing immigration courts. Generally speaking, expedited removal applies to persons who have been in the United States without authorization for up to two years.   Thus, any long-term authorized resident would not be subjected to expedited removal.

The Trump administration has filed a proposed change to expedited removal by reversing a 2022 policy by the Biden  administration to limited use of expedited removal to persons within 100 miles of the border. The new rule will extend the power throughout the U.S.

The NY Times reported that on January 25 Dept of Homeland Security Secretary Homans issued a memo which extends expedited removal to all so-called CHNV humanitarian visa holders – those who have been admitted up to 30,000 a month since this program was created by Biden to divert persons from the Mexican border. The CBP One app was used for many of these persons as well as by others. The DHS is basically saying that the CHNV program and the CBP App were illegal and thus anyone admitted through one or both of these programs is not authorized. This entire population is about 1.2 million.

This initiative is consistent with my expectation that Trump will go after the large numbers of persons admitted under Biden by temporary visa programs.

 

 

 

 

 

If the Supreme Court approves the end of birthright citizenship…

Millions of children already born will have their citizenship revoked. The number of living persons born in past decades in circumstances which Trump’s EO would bar citizenship runs into the millions. Many have had their own children, whose citizenship status would be thrown into doubt. The number of current children (uner 180 affected likely runs into the milllions.

The NY Times swallows the bait of the Laken Riley Act

Republicans in Congress got what they sought in the Laken Riley Act, which was a headline in the New York Times saying “House Passes Bill to Deport Immigrants Convicted of Violence Against Women.”

The headlines implies that the law applies to all immigrants. It applies only to persons not authorized to be the country. These persons have always been subject to deportation.  The Biden, Trump and Obama administrations all deported hundreds of thousands of persons annually.

Most deportees had committed a crime, but most of the crimes committed were not crimes committed against persons or property. Rather, they were Illegal entry or reentry, unauthorized work, false claims of U.S. citizenship, and the like.

The headline also implies that the law is especially designed to protect women from violence. The law does not do that.  The past administrations have clearly made a priority of detaining and deporting unauthorized persons who committed any serious crime. This priority was specified in written high-level guidance for years. What this law does is in effect to broaden the range of illegal offences to as low as shoplifting, to mandate detention if is the person is accused of such an act, and to authorize state Attorneys General to have standing in suits that can halt all immigration from a specified country

The incoming Trump administration is trying to create the illusion of a vast population of unauthorized persons who committed some kind of infraction, however trivial, and to lump them together with convicted criminals against property and persons.

 

 

 

 

UK and German program to recruit nurses from other countries

United Kingdom: The UK’s National Health Service has recruited, as of March 2023, 164,198 internationally educated professionals in its Nursing and Midwifery Council program. This means that approximately one in five nurses, midwives, and nursing associates practicing in the UK were educated abroad. The primary sources of international nurses for the UK include India, Philippines, Nigeria, Ghana and Zambia.  The NHS deeply depends on these foreign born and trained nurses: in 2022-2023, 25,006 internationally educated nurses joined the NHS compared to 27,142 UK-educated nurses.

Germany: It is in a much more challenging situation due to language issues, and its very low volume shows how difficult it will be for non-English or perhaps non-French speaking advanced countries to recruit nurses from abroad. Germany has a “Triple Win” program to address its nursing shortage. The initiative was established in 2013. It targets Bosnia and Herzegovina, Philippines, Tunisia, Indonesia, Jordan, India (Kerala and Telangana states). The program appears to have brought in only about 6,000 nurses, compared to a shortage that has been estimated at 150,000.

The program is run by the German Federal Employment Agency’s International Placement Services (ZAV) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH

 

 

Revised figures for number of recent immigrants

One June 9,2024, I summarized the conflicting estimates of the level of recent foreign born persons. The figures differed widely among Federal estimates. The difficulties arise from the surge of aslyum applicants and temporary visas issued for humanitarian purposes. And, the total figures do not distinquish well between permanent (Gree card) entrants and other entrants.

In the past few days, the Census, which as had the lower bound of estimates, increased its count for FY 2023 from 1.1 million to 2.3 million. its 2024 estimate of 2.8 million holds.

Here is what the Census said on December 20: “Net international migration, which refers to any change of residence across U.S. borders (the 50 states and the District of Columbia), was the critical demographic component of change driving growth in the resident population. With a net increase of 2.8 million people, it accounted for 84% of the nation’s 3.3 million increase in population between 2023 and 2024. This reflects a continued trend of rising international migration, with a net increase of 1.7 million in 2022 and 2.3 million in 2023.”

In the 2010s, the Census recorded a net immigration total hovering around one million. The 2022, 2023 and 2024 totals come to an average annual figure of 2.3 milion, or 1.3 million higher than past trend.

Did the Dems lose their way in immigration, or did Biden?

The Atlantic has a new article, “How Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration: The party once championed an approach popular with voters and politicians alike. Why give up on it?” by Cecilia Muñoz and Frank Sharry.

They write, “How did Democrats fall so far and so quickly on immigration? It’s easy to blame Trump, and the lure of his xenophobic rhetoric. But we believe that immigration has become a losing issue for Democrats over the past decade because elected leaders have followed progressive advocates to the left, beyond the political space available to them. Voters, feeling unheard and frustrated, may have squirmed at Trump’s racism and radicalism, but they also saw him as someone who took the problem seriously and was trying to address it.”

The article provides no critique of Biden’s immigration policies. It was these policies, not the “progressive advocates,” who mis-managed immigration. Biden failed to address the public about the issue. He tried to bury the news on border crossing by shifting migration into temporary visas.  The number of persons entering the country in during the Biden administration far exceeded past patterns for decades, and put strain on public shelter programs and school systems.

One of the authors, Frank Sharry, “served as an immigration advisor to Kamala Harris.  Harris told the public that she would not have changed anything Biden did.

 

Thanksgiving poem

Poem by Rumi, in Gold, trans by Haleh Liza Gafori, New York Review Books, 2022 page 55

 

Spring is here—

fragrant, musky spring is here.

The Beloved is here,

the Soul of souls is here,

the One who welcomes everyone is here.

 

Wine is here, the wine of dawn is here,

wine that floods the soul with joy is here.

The cupbearer fills everyone’s cup.

 

Clarity is here—

stones in the river pulse with sunlight.

 

The cure is here, the cure for every ill is here.

The friend who soothes the ache is here.

 

The healer is here.

The healer who’s felt every shade of feeling is here.

 

Dance is here, the whirling dance is here.

The eternal bond and glorious breeze are here.

Poppies, basil, and the tulips’ stunning eyes are here.

 

One is here.

One who makes someone of no one is here.

 

The bright moon that clears the haze is here.

The heart stirring all hearts to laughter is here.

 

The Beloved is here, the Soul of souls is here—

and never left.

It’s our eyes that come and go.

 

Be silent now. Let silence speak.

Surrender the syllables you count on your fingers.

The river of countless messages is here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The mass deportation idea is dead

We’re going to see the incoming administration weasel out of its rhetoric and focus on deporting persons with a criminal record. Administrations since Obama have been doing this. We are going to hear more about cancelling DACA, parole and TPS.

Senator Rand Paul, incoming chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said that it would be a “terrible image” to use the Army to arrest unauthorized persons.

Denver mayor Mike Johnson said he would resist any mass deportation effort using military personnel.

Boston mayor Michelle Wu said that she will resist mass deportation efforts.

An analogy: in the early days of the Kennedy administration in 1961, the White House launched a program to construction bomb shelters. Not too long after, a Christian minister opined that it was not inconsistent with Christian doctrine for a family to shoot people trying to get into their home shelter. The administration quickly abandoned the project.