[ifwinterco]

Fair point, but the issue I’m getting at is all too often from a European perspective the pipeline is:

Expensive publicly funded European education for 25 years -> high paid job in the US.

Costs are all paid by Europe, tax revenue and job creation all accrue to the US.

If we’re not careful it ends up being a straight transfer of value from ordinary European taxpayers to the US government which seems… suboptimal.

If the US can short circuit that process by shooting themselves in the foot, Europe will benefit

[bflesch]

Fully agree but it is still a risk for the US, because if the clever immigrants notice they can't get as rich as their American-born peers and on top of that US leadership publicly antagonizes their country of origin, those foreign-born engineers can quickly become foreign agents.

[ifwinterco]

Yes true, and the US is maybe big enough to adopt that approach.

It’s what China does (except for poaching people from Taiwan), but they have 1bn people so for them it makes sense