Trump Is Closing Doors to World’s Smartest People
The right response to China’s theft of U.S. ideas is to admit more of its top students, not fewer.
U.S.’s gain is China’s loss.
Photographer: Ruan Yulin/China News Service/Visual China Group/Getty ImagesOn June 6, 1944, American soldiers stormed the beaches of France, beginning a campaign that would roll back Nazi Germany’s control of Western Europe. It was an unprecedented display of military might and organizational prowess for the U.S. The man who led that heroic effort was himself of German descent -- general and future president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s family, which changed the spelling of the name from Eisenhauer (meaning “iron miner”), was originally from an area called Nassau-Saarbrücken -- ironically, one of the territories the general would go on to liberate.
Had the U.S. been the same country in 1944 that it was in 1917, there might not have been an American of German extraction leading the charge. As the U.S. prepared to fight Germany in World War I, anti-German sentiment swept the nation. Schools stopped teaching German, German-Americans were harassed and fired from their jobs, and 6,000 Germans and German-Americans were sent to mass internment camps. It seems inconceivable that a general of German descent would have been allowed to lead the U.S. military against his family’s ancestral homeland in 1917. And yet a mere 27 years later, that impossibility had become reality.