MIT President L. Rafael Reif Doesn't Want Trump Cutting His Supply Of Foreign Students, Thinks We Should Care
05/11/2017
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In The Holy War Against Immigration Controls [American Spectator, May 10, 2017,] Gilbert Sewall has an excellent reply to L. Rafael Reif, the President of the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology [[email protected]] who recently delivered himself of an open letter that called an attempt to ban travelers from Muslim terrorist countries

a stunning violation of our deepest American values, the values of a nation of immigrants: fairness, equality, openness, generosity, courage. The Statue of Liberty is the “Mother of Exiles”; how can we slam the door on desperate refugees? Religious liberty is a founding American value; how can our government discriminate against people of any religion? In a nation made rich by immigrants, why would we signal to the world that we no longer welcome new talent? In a nation of laws, how can we reject students and others who blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah (sorry, heard it before)

Sewall answers Reif's points, hitting the one about  "The Statue of Liberty is the 'Mother of Exiles' " out of the park, but I want to make a point of my own. Just before I zoned out there, I noticed that the head of the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology was saying something about how wrong it was for the Government of the United States to ban foreign students—who are a major source of income for MIT and all other technology universities.

It's the same point we made about Janet Napolitano and the Harvard officials who argued for resisting Trump's attempts to enforce immigration law—they try to make it sound like they have moral high ground, but since they profit from legal and illegal students they’re in the same moral (and legal) position as  an employer of wetback labor. His feeling that the government shouldn't regulate his source of supply should treated with same contempt any CEO of a dangerous, unregulated industry would receive.

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