For a little over two hours, I’ve been watching/reading the news out of the Las Vegas Strip, where one lone gunman created mayhem in a matter of minutes. Consider those numbers: One shooter. 55 dead. 515 injured.
Many of those injured are believed to be critical, so that toll can only go up. But even where it stands at present, the shooting at the Mandalay Bay Resort on the strip is the deadliest mass shooting in US history.
Yeah, that is a classic click bait headline, but for once I mean just that.
Here it is, a Vice documentary on Charlottesville.
Since last night, I’ve watched this half a dozen times, trying to unpack the many layers — and yet there is more to be seen at every subsequent viewing. But, broadly, this is what I see:
Reading matter: A lengthy Vanity Fair profile of General David Petraeus, the man changing the way America fights its wars.
One part of the US response to recession has been to tighten the rules surrounding the H1B visa — and since the start of this year and this administration, the pages of India Abroad, the paper I help edit and produce, has featured a flat out debate on the topic.
Proponents have based their argument on the line that with unemployment rising across the US, there is no case to be made for bringing in guest workers, however skilled, from outside. Opponents have argued that (1) Guest workers fill a legitimate need in the workforce and (2) that absent the H1B program, bright students who come to the US to get an education and now find they cannot stay behind to join the workforce will go back to the country of origin — that is to say, the US will end up providing the education, only to create competition for itself. This segment of opinion makers has moreover repeatedly warned that unless rules in this regard are relaxed, there will be a drop in the number of enrollments in US universities.
The debate has been heated, but has largely taken place in a vacuum, with few if any facts to back the rival claims. Here’s the first real sighting of quantifiable stats:
U.S. grad school admissions for would-be international students plummeted this year, according to the Council of Graduate Schools—the first decline in five years
. The decline was 3% on average, thanks to increases from China and the Middle East, but some countries saw double-digit declines in interest in a U.S. education. Applicants from India and South Korea fell 12% and 9% respectively—with students turning their sights on schools in Asia and Europe instead.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Much of the world’s economic growth—hence, jobs—is in emerging markets, the schools are far cheaper and in many cases competitive academically, and then there’s the H-1B issue. If America won’t allow a PhD just trained in our top schools to work here and contribute to the economy—why come here and take on the student loans to begin with?
Read on — the debate below the post is interesting.
Smoke Signals 