Vice president JD Vance granted Newsmax host Greg Kelly an "exclusive interview,” excerpts of which aired Thursday night. When Kelly asked about “brain drain,” highly skilled professionals leaving the United States due to President Donald Trump’s relentless war on higher education, Vance’s response was perfectly ironic.
“If you go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s, the American space program—the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon—was built by American citizens, some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent,” he said.
Vance’s reference to “some German and Jewish scientists” who fled Europe to come to the United States “during World War II,” as Nazis rose to power in Germany, is what literally laid the foundation for the concept of “brain drain.”
Trump’s attack on higher education has been multifaceted. His inhumane immigration policies have struck fear in international talent by violating students’ free speech and threatening detainment and deportation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s wholesale revocation of thousands of student visas has also frozen the immigration process for foreign scholars and professionals.
More damaging still are Trump’s threats and cuts to billions in federal funding to top research institutions like Harvard, which have already inspired top U.S. talent to begin seeking opportunities abroad.
Turns out that forcing the brightest minds to conform to anti-educational MAGA propaganda isn’t the best tactic for luring scholars to U.S. institutions.
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