I'm not sure if your comment is a joke or not, but it's not a bad idea. Find one of the few remaining Gros Michels, edit it so that it is resistant to Fusarium, and start growing them again.
And the same could be done with other monoculture crops. It then becomes an arms race between scientists and viruses.
Given that much research is from American public financing, why pay foreign grad students to perform research when salaries could be raised enough to attract US resident students.
Except it's not really attractive to many capable people in their right mind who wouldn't wanna go down that rabbit hole called academia with low salaries, uncertain future, require you to constantly look for a new job and move around every 2-3 years (typically year-based contracts with 0 guarantees about the next year), and maybe a very small chance of getting a real job at the end that doesn't have an expiration date from day 1 in your mid-40s with mediocre salary comparable to what a junior dev would get in a small IT company. The strain this puts on a family is a whole another dimension of the issue.
There is a reason why physics departments are populated with Chinese and Indian researchers: it still beats the opportunities and life awaiting them at home. For people in developed countries? Not so much.
Being a Research Assistant (RA) or a Teaching Assistant (TA) is not a job per se but part of ones training while in grad school. Whatever you're paid while performing such duties is just a stipend, and not a salary in the traditional sense.
So, no, universities are not going to hire Americans to RA and TA positions if they have no incentive to be in grad school.
Foreign students come here because they want to come here to learn. Being paid for RA and TA responsibilities is just a bonus. Professors reap the benefit of having some of the best minds from around the globe around them.
Top universities (Stanford, MIT, Ivy League) don't have a money problem, and they don't have a supply-demand problem. Prospective students would gladly join and work for free, be they foreigners or US residents. They do pay though, although it's not clear what drives their level of pay. Maybe one factor is that if they paid more, it could end up being counterproductive, as the post about f-u money that has been on HN recently can attest.
They did not actually buy the ad. They are simultaneously making fun of Super Bowl advertising and how easily people believe fake news (no fact checking that there was never a potato ad aired)
1. The political upheaval that brought Trump to the US presidency may soon depose Merkel.
2. Trump is an isolationist and picked isolationist advisers. Trump's base probably thinks that its a good idea for Trump not to aggressively defend liberalism and freedom throughout the world, e.g. quit the Middle East rather than reform Islam via carrot and stick.
Maybe green card holders/work visas can pay taxes, build companies, hire people and contribute to American prosperity while not drawing benefits, rather then get the door slammed in their face.
Hope that others on Trump's list do the same. A major step in radicalization is for some US Muslims to visit a radical Muslim country in order to become more devout and perhaps radicalized for jihad against the USA when they return home.
Extreme vetting may fix individual situations when that policy gets deployed.
People get radicalized in Iran? That country, at least in the urban parts, is remarkably secular. The expatriate Iranian community in the US is mostly urban, secular, and educated at US universities. If anyone wanted to turn Iranians into partisans they would have instituted a travel ban, that's the surefire way to really piss them off.
