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.
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