By Diane Roberts
Foreigners! What have they ever done for us?
I grant you there was that 18th century guy, that Marquis de Lafayette, who convinced the French government to back us against the British and used his own money to help fund the War of Independence.
You could argue the Chinese who came over in the 19th century to build the railroad also had their uses.
They worked for practically nothing, rarely whined about getting dynamited on the regular or not being eligible for citizenship.
But the foreigners clogging up our colleges don’t help make America great again.
While some would say Albert Einstein was the kind of foreigner you want hanging around, what with him being smart at science and all, he took a job at Princeton that could have gone to a real American.
Why couldn’t one of us have come up with theories about the universe that were just as good or better than his?
We’re the ones who invented the quarter-pound hamburger, the microwave oven, the credit card, and Spanx.
To be fair, immigrants obtain patents at about twice the rate of regular Americans, and OK, gave us video games and doughnut machines.
Plus, I guess we have to mention that foreign-born researchers represent 25% of America’s Nobel Prize winners.
But so what? Is any of this really great?
‘Pull the plug’
Not according to our fearless governor, who vows to rid us of annoying people with their strange accents and peculiar habits, especially in Florida’s institutions of higher education.
Ron DeSantis demands the state Board of Governors “pull the plug” on those H-1B visas that allow practically any Tomás, Didier, or Haoran with a fancy degree and a slew of top-drawer publications to get a gig in our colleges.
“Universities across the country are importing foreign workers on H-1B visas instead of hiring Americans who are qualified and available to do the job,” said DeSantis. “We will not tolerate H-1B abuse in Florida institutions.”
Colleges are, as the governor says, “doing social justice.”
We don’t do social justice in Florida.
DeSantis’ Exhibit A: “A clinical assistant professor from Supposed Palestine,” the West Bank, now teaching at the University of Florida.
Of course you realize “Supposed Palestine” is one of the most feared places on earth, full of teenagers armed with slingshots, so vicious that Israeli settlers are forced to burn mosques, villages, and olive trees just to keep them in line.
The university would probably argue that professor is a super-brain and the most qualified for the job, but do we really want young Floridians exposed to ideas that could confuse them about who they’re supposed to hate in the Middle East?
Diversity gone wild, clearly.
UF’s got too many foreigners; FSU has a long history of coddling them, too.
In 1949, Florida State’s School of Music hired a Hungarian named Ernst von Dohnanyi.
He was renowned as a brilliant composer and pianist, called a “Romantic master,” and had been a courageous anti-Nazi fighter who also hated the Soviet regime.
But come on: Wasn’t there an American who had more or less the same resumé?
‘Ignorant, naive, blindsided’
In the 1980s, FSU brought in one Paul Dirac, a former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.
That’s a supposedly big-deal position once held by Isaac Newton, the one who got the idea about gravity by watching apples fall out of trees.
Science nerds call Dirac, a Nobel Prize-winner, the Father of Quantum Mechanics, which is all very well, but I’ll bet FSU could have got a Ph.D. from, say, the University of Alabama to do the same thing, and cheaper, too.
Take a look at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory there in Tallahassee.
It’s like the UN.
Take Dr. Likai Song: an M.D. and Ph.D. who works on cancer and HIV vaccines.
He went to Harvard and got his doctorate in Biophysics at FSU.
He’s won a bunch of NIH and NSF grants and fancy research awards, but he was born in China.
China, people.
Or what about Peter Gor’kov, a native of Russia, who makes magnetic resonance probes, instruments that tell you what’s going on inside magnets (or something like that)?
Who understands that stuff? Not red-blooded Americans!
Now I don’t know if any of these folks became citizens, but the point is there must be gazillions of native-born people with normal-sounding names like “Smith” and “Henderson” who could do those jobs.
If you listen to the professors and the students, you’d think the governor is a nasty, angry fellow who wants to destroy academic freedom and deny students perspectives from across the world while telling Floridians this will make us great again.
One uppity prof said, “I think people are ignorant, naive, blindsided or just generally racist to accept that perspective.”
He claimed international educators “add so much value, provide so much to citizens, whether it be health care, education, engineering,”
Oh contrarywise!
Picky, picky, picky
More than 60,000 egghead types work for Florida’s colleges and universities, and of those a full 1.7% are foreign.
That’s about 1,020 jobs stolen from Americans!
How hard can it be to become qualified in, say, immunology and microbiology like USF’s Hossam Ashour, born in Egypt and ranked among the top 2% of researchers worldwide?
There’s probably a TikTok video you can watch.
But the lefty-wokey academics claim there aren’t enough qualified American scientists around.
At the University of Miami, a big chunk of the biochemists, biophysicists, medical researchers, and molecular and cellular biologists are on H1-B visas.
According to the Miami Hurricane newspaper, some of UM’s obviously spoiled students aren’t happy about removing the foreigners. One said, “The STEM departments at UM could definitely struggle from a loss of international professors.”
A sophomore studying microbiology and immunology (aren’t we getting rid of those stupid vaccines?) seems to think the H1-Bs are a good thing: “It was interesting to experience [international professors’] teaching styles because they’re different from professors I’ve had before.”
American STEM not good enough for these kids?
Anti-American Americans like to bring up “the law” and “the Constitution,” pointing out that H1-B visas actually fall under the control of the federal government and Ron DeSantis can’t just wave them away.
Picky, picky.
Doesn’t matter: President Trump will help by charging $100 grand per new H-1B visa.
That ought to slow them down.
Of course the “that’s illegal” crowd, fringe types such as unions, 20 state attorneys general, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are pitching a fit over our great America First Forever A+++++ policies and suing the government.
‘Filthy countries’
Nevertheless, Trump will not waver from his determination to rid America of foreigners — unless they’re incredibly sexy or incredibly rich.
Take our well-dressed First Lady. She was a model who arrived in New York on an EB-1, often called the “Genius Visa.”
How about Elon Musk, one-time student visa holder? Sure, he dropped out of Stanford and probably worked illegally, but so what?
Without him, Mars will always be a cold, obscure planet with an unbreathable atmosphere instead of a potential vacation spot.
We need him, just like we need those oppressed white South Africans whose only crime was appropriating land belonging to the people who may have lived there for millennia but were failing to monetize it properly.
What we don’t need is so-called “experts” from countries with names we can’t spell.
No worries: Like DeSantis, the president is on the case.
He’s going big, too, planning to strip an untold number of so-called “naturalized” Americans of their citizenship.
The Justice Department says it’ll go after people who may be criminals, misrepresented themselves on their applications, or sneakily obtained citizenship during the Biden administration.
Just last year, 800,000 people, mostly from India, Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic, took the oath.
Come on: Where are the Norwegians?
As for all these students pouring into our country and our state, many from “filthy” countries, Trump wants their social media inspected for any sign of terrorist tendencies such as making fun of him and deny their visas.
DeSantis says Florida’s public schools shouldn’t educate kids here without legal status, nor admit any undocumented student to one of our universities.
He will make sure the Sunshine State, home of the Cuban sandwich, is free of foreign influence.
It’s the patriotic thing to do.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.
Cisco says
Just out of curiosity, how many of these snook in or were invited,please articulate this for your readers!
Pierre Tristam says
As many as your Puritan ancestors or the enslaved people who made your country. “Invited” isn’t the word you want to use when discussing American history.
Sherry says
@ cisco. . . You should ask that question of the actual “native American tribes” murdered and abused by the “European” pilgrims/explorers/settlers.
huh says
Isn’t snook a fish?
Laurel says
Yes
Skibum says
Screw the rest of the world… the maga idiot in the WH and the mini-maga idiot gov in Tallahassee will just keep spouting nonsense to their mush brained sheeple that our higher education systems just need more American born (white) graduates who can bring the entire country back to using big, beautiful, “clean” coal energy! Yes!!!
JimboXYZ says
Hard to take Diane Roberts seriously in this article. USA wants the est of the immigrants, not the one’s that were purged from prisons. Nobody denies what immigrants have done for USA. The whole colonization thing was immigration as a relative invasion. It’s the open borders of 2021 & 2024 of Biden. Biden closed borders in 2024 in an attempt to wh*re votes. And he relied heavily on the Covid thing for his first couple of years and still couldn’t stop the leakage into the USA. Biden went after more money, said it was necessary to get the border crisis resolved. Tuns out that was a Delaware Lie. However did Trump resolve the border crisis with the same funding ? This is a matter of whether DeSantis embraces or resists the Federal direction on immigration. Under Trump, it was a matter of catching the “Got Aways”. One can do what DeSantis did for a position, or one can take the position of Gavin Newsom. I think deep down Diane Roberts is a Californian. She need to move there, instead of whining about FL. We all saw what Martha’s Vineyard did for taking in Biden refugees. That’s Obama as part of that community. Evidently they don’t want certain immigrant types there, types that they have no problem forcing on the rest of us ?
PaulT says
It’s interesting – ‘Jimbo XYZ’ – how history repeats itself.
Your comment, the “US wants the best of the immigrants not the one’s that were purged from prisons” along with ‘released from asylums’ was a major argument in the anti immigrant hysteria of the 1920’s which led to the 1924 Immigration Act. The complaint. aimed largely at Southern Europpeans, was as unjustified then as it is now but was followed by a total ban on immigration by Asians.
Incidentally, a few years later the Stock Market crashed then came the Great Depression which was worsened by 1930’s tariffs.
Land of no turn signals says says
Legal or illegal?
Pierre Tristam says
Both, and mostly illegal of course, as were the overwhelming majority of the continent’s colonial invaders from the Puritans on, though the contribution of more recent undocumented immigrants would prove to be, hour by hour, more hard working than that of the native born, whose habits of self-indulgence can’t be overstated.
Sherry says
Right On Diane! To hell with the notion that civilizations evolve like a rising tide. . . the success of each and every human being “lifts us ALL up”!!!
Maga would much prefer that we continue to march over the downtrodden.
Unfortunately, there are millions who are so insecure, they try to make themselves feel better by “putting others down”. . .causing the “de-evolution” of our entire society. Maga in a nutshell!
Mike P says
Gov. Ron DeSantis has not made a public vow using the exact phrasing “annoying people with strange accents and peculiar habits. If you disagree feel free to show you source of this fake news statement. You choose to use this hyperbolic language to mock the Governor’s actual policy positions regarding higher education and immigration
Desantitze florida says
The governor is a racist bootlicker that has stolen over 35 million tax payer dollars.
Sherry says
@mike p. . . Geez! Diane Roberts’ articles are NOT meant to be “news statements”. . . I guess satire is completely lost on you.
Bo Peep says
Out of context comment. He is referring to Illegal immigrants so stop trying to spin it. Almost all of us are immigrants.
PaulT says
Have you checked your family tree?
Before 1892 pretty much all immigrantion was undocumented, so your ancestors might have been ‘illegals’
Atwp says
What has white Americans done for America? What has Trump and Desantis done for America and Florida? White Americans in my opinion did very little for the country but reaped the benefits from the slave labor and the immigrants labor. Don’t forget they murdered thousands and thousands of people. Study the lynching years, and the deaths of thousands of immigrants during hard labor for nothing. Answer the question white people what did you do for the country?
Ed P says
Amen sister. Doesn’t everyone enjoy a “real” conspiracy theory?
Al says
If the left was honest this would read illegals not immigrants. There is no problem with legal immigration but the visa system is being abused
Before foreign workers are recruited there needs to be a search for Americans that can fill these positions. The left loves to corral all people into one category instead of individual responses. Certain fields need more workers but not to lower the wages of American workers in the same fields.
Sherry says
@al. . . Well, let’s actually “think” about all those great “high paying” jobs in the “tourism economy” of Florida that will be opening up and available to you, your kids, and grandkids:
* Hotel Room/Business Cleaners-Yippee!
* Roofers- Yippee!
* Short Order Cooks- Yippee!
* Picking Crops- Yippee!
* Gardeners- Yippee!
* Fish cleaning and slaughterhouses- Yippee!
* Grocery store clerks- Yippee!
* Road Construction Crews- Yippee!
Thank goodness your family’s career future is secure!
Laurel says
“Before forgein workers [I guess he means migrants, who have been working here, legally, for decades] are recruited there needs to be to be a search for Americans that can fill these positions.”
Isn’t that DEI?
What do you figure your beans and mellons will cost if Americans are picking them? Oh, and good luck with that “search.” You might find a quietly quitting Gen Z to do the job.
Laurel says
Well, there’s one Norwegian American here. The reason I’m here is, my great grandparents migrated from Norway in search of a better life, like everyone else tries to do. They moved to North Dakota, and literally lived in a sod shack, with a dirt floor. They were farmers. Eventually, they moved to Wisconsin, and built a farm. During the Great Depression, they sold that farm and moved to Miami Beach. My grandmother started a business, on her own, on Lincoln Road. Then, she increased her business on Los Olas, and turned it into an up scale shop for women. About then, I came along.
My family’s taxes went into my public schooling. Our lives became better through hard work. I learned from them, and spent my whole life as a hard worker.
That’s what immigrants do, whether they are white or black or yellow or brown. They work their way up. Explain any different mindset to the Cuban Americans in Miami. It makes me wonder about those who cry that immigrants are taking their jobs. To me, that’s a lie. An excuse. You don’t succeed simply by pushing others away.
I hate what DeSantis is doing to this great state. I grew up in Florida, and it has always been free, well, at least to the white folks. Once it became free to all, the oppression began, again. On our way to Jacksonville, we made a pit stop, and there was the sign that read “Welcome to Free Florida.” It’s “Free Florida” if you don’t mind DeSantis handing over ALL your personal information to the current, so called, federal justice system. It’s free if you can afford a $1,000,000 “Gold Card.” It’s free if you can send your kid to religious schools on the tax paid public school system’s dime. It’s free if you think the way DeSantis wants you to think.
It’s just plain blatant bigotry, and if you think that’s “free,” then I wonder about you.
Jim H. says
Laurel – My immigrant great-grandparents and 18 children left Bohemia in the 1880s for God knows where. Some unknown territory that waited for them to arrive. They physically walked from the East Coast to Dickinson, North Dakota! Europe’s loss, and the West’s expansion, began to fill those freezing, barren plains. These extremely proud and courageous folks worked on their farms, and my family is still there among all the Norwegians, Germans, and Bohemians. All neighbors – compassionate to one another.
I, too, moved from that cold white north to FTL in the 50s. I always thought there was at least one smart Vrana in the family. FTL was always home from then on. Everyone was from somewhere else. We were all friends in a new land. Public schools, CCH, or PineCrest!
We enjoyed the weather and the politics – from the glory days of Collins, Hayden Burns, Byran, Kirk, Bush. Met them all. The last one I met was Graham. Democrats outnumber all but one Republican.
I am certain I have met you, too, as I have walked the sands from PC to STA and back.
I am now puttering through my autumn years and have left Florida for the very last time.
To the very young and especially the youth of today’s PC – Enjoy what you have today, because tomorrow it may be a parking lot.
Laurel says
Thank you, Jim H.
Ft Lauderdale has changed so dramatically. I miss it so! My husband is from there, too. We came here to try to find a little of our old Florida, but the irresponsible developers, and those who profit from paving paradise, came rushing in with their claims of wonderful growth. That’s all Florida is to them, profit. They care for nothing else.
Welcome via the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, to Free Florida.
Endless dark money says
When someone uses the word,
“illegals” I am done listening to what they have to say. I live in America, a nation stolen from the indigenous natives, built on the backs of slaves, & made prosperous by the sweat, & blood of immigrants. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” My country is not white. It’s not Christian. It’s American. It’s made up of people from around the globe.
Humans aren’t illegal. But your dehumanization, & demonization should be.
Endless dark money says
When someone uses the word,
“illegals” I am done listening to what they have to say. I live in America, a nation stolen from the indigenous natives, built on the backs of slaves, & made prosperous by the sweat, & blood of immigrants. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” My country is not white. It’s not Christian. It’s American. It’s made up of people from around the globe.
Humans aren’t illegal. But your dehumanization, & demonization should be.
What Else Is New says
Thank you, Pierre for including Diane Roberts’ important piece in Flaglerlive news. Good Lord, do we still have those pesky MAGAs dirtying ups this website with their Aryan only societal system? Hmm. I believe this is what Hitler demanded for Germany. Do away with the ‘others.’ Diane Roberts brilliantly posited how we have long benefitted from immigrants in the United States of America. Too bad MAGAs wish to ignore logic, intelligence and truth. We have been guarded in observing Ron Charity Fraud DeSantis attack educational institutions, now realizing his utter lack of respect therein. He is the most hateful, incompetent racist Governor ever.
Paul Dirac finished his career says
… in FLORIDA!?!
And here I was, just thinking a few days ago that I had never heard of Einstein even visiting Florida… not even for a brief lecture tour.
You never hear of stories of “Einstein in Florida.”
Poor Paul.
Just an opinion.
Sherry says
Maga= Zero sense of humor, irony, hypocrisy, sarcasm or understanding of satire!
Maybe they see absolutely everything as fake news or conspiracy theories because that is actually their world, and their source for their fear and hate filled alternate reality.
Skibum says
I have to wonder if the maga sheeple who support all of the convicted felon’s administration sycophants, who close their eyes and ears to all of the unconstitutional actions being taken against immigrants, and who keep spouting they are against only “illegals, not legal immigrants” really have any intellect at all??? Are they uneducated? Are they blind to what the pedophile protecting president is ordering his federal law enforcement agents to do, even to American citizens? Or do these maga collaborators, because that is what they are, simply not care how horribly the current federal agencies treat human beings… as long as it is not them?
Everyone knows and acknowledges that our country’s immigration system is broken. But the republi-cons, having had many bipartisan efforts in Congress to join in a consensus to pass legislation and fix the known problems, instead keep refusing to participate. It is like if they were a home owner watching a huge pipe break under a sink that is flooding the entire house while they just stand there and scream obscenities about the problem, but make no move whatsoever to try to resolve it, allowing the problem to get worse, and worse, and worse so they can scream even louder.
It is republi-con insanity, pure and simple. All they want is more and more border fencing, and to deport every single individual in this country who doesn’t appear to be a fair-haired Caucasian. That is their obscene, unhinged, unconstitutional leader’s desire, so they are in it for the win, come hell or high water (pun intended).
Meanwhile, even American citizens in many locals have resorted to not leaving their homes unless they have their U.S. passports in their pockets to hopefully keep them from being jacked up by the jack booted, masked and unidentified feds who are out and about, scouring through our nation’s cities in unmarked cars, screeching to a stop at the sight of dark-skinned individuals, and pouncing on them, throwing handcuffed people into vehicles and speeding off to an ever growing number of quickly assembled detention centers where detainees are held, sometimes not even allowed to notify family or contact an attorney to represent them IF they ever get charged with any federal crime or taken to court.
This is NOT in any sense of the word how potential illegal immigrants have been in the past or are currently supposed to be handled by federal authorities! I know that for a fact due to working hand in hand with federal law enforcement, particularly the Border Patrol, for many years when I was a deputy sheriff working in Southern CA where we had lots of experience placing immigration holds on individuals who were arrested for other crimes and additionally held for federal authorities to determine if they were in the country legally or not.
If republi-cons truly, really, seriously want to be believed that they want the ongoing problems with our immigration system to be fixed, they have to acknowledge and understand that it cannot and will not just be their way or the highway. Consensus and compromise in both the Senate and the House is a necessary and desirable outcome. We have almost been there before, the last time not long ago before republi-cons at the order from the convicted criminal president told them not to pass that legislation because he would rather yell and complain about our broken immigration system than work together to fix it.
If you’re not willing to be part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. And it is obvious that, right now, more republi-cons are willingly part of the problem.