The Cost of Turning Away Talent

Back in July, Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute considered the costs of Trump's anti-immigration agenda, and finds them exorbitant. The gist of this well-argued and alarming piece: ...STEM students who stay in the U.S. after graduation "patent new inventions at four times the rate of typical college graduates and are responsible for around 10 percent of all new inventions patented in the United States. They found high-growth startup companies at six times the rate of US-born graduates."That means we can dispense with the idea that if a foreign engineer gets a job, an American engineer must have lost one. Protectionism applied to human capital relies on the same economic fallacy that underlies other forms of protectionism: the belief that the economy is like one pie, and hence, allowing foreign interests to take a seat hurts those already at the table.Economies don't work that way. Talented people don't merely fill existing jobs. They create them by inventing products, starting…