Diane Feinstein: Anti-Smart-But-Poor-Immigrant/Pro-Smart-And-Rich-Immigrant

Steve Clemons reports that Diane Feinstein had an amendment inserted into the immigration bill that provides for a new tax, on the smart foreign students, whom she worries have been keeping otherwise promising American students out of public university slots. Feinstein's solution to the problem, as she perceived it, was to essentially build a money fence around the country, over which foreign applicants will now have to climb. She's doubled student visa application fees from $1000 to $2000. In other words, she's mounted the ramparts to guard against an alleged invading horde of poor smart foreign students, while simultaneously extending a warm welcome (with an awaiting open palm to be greased) to wealthy smart foreign students. Because it's actually okay, after all, to keep promising American students out of public university slots, as long as them smarty pants furriners gots money. How, well gosh, Republican of her. Clemons has a decidedly low opinion of Feinstein's amendment. Steve believes "America should be promoting foreign student enrollment in public and private U.S. universities to keep America on the positive side of global brain drain realities." In other words, we as a nation benefit from intelligent people coming to us, not staying away. Whittier College, which I attended in the late 1960s, has always encouraged foreign student enrollment. Not merely to provide an Americanized education to students from other parts of the world, but to expose its American students to other cultures. (As of Fall 2003, five percent of its enrollment was international students.) My first college roommate was from Thailand. I had the privilege of friendships with people from around the globe, with a diversity of accents and habits and appetites for unusual food. College was - and is still alleged to be - a "learning environment." Alas, what Feinstein painfully fails to grasp is the wealth of insight all those bright, young, well-educated people (poor as well as rich) from other cultures have, y'know, to offer us, (a wealth way more important than mere money, to anyone genuinely concerned about education).