• xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    12 hours ago

    The West has been poaching talents from the Global South since the past century, luring them with strong currencies like the dollar and euro, and at the same time still manage to use them to drive down the wages of domestic labor because immigrant workers are willing to work much harder at a lesser pay that is still relatively lucrative compared to their home country’s salary.

    Global South countries have spent innumerable resources and decades of effort to cultivate their best and brightest youth and gifted them scholarships to study overseas at top universities in the West. Many of them would get job offers in Western companies and chose to stay there. The West gets to poach all these talents at virtually no cost.

    Make no mistake, this is a form of financial imperialism - the use of its strong currency to create brain drains in the Global South, which further impedes the latter’s ability to develop their own technological and economic sovereignty.

    Every year, nearly 600-700k Chinese students go abroad to study in the US alone, and many of them hoping to get their green cards eventually and living out an American dream. If it weren’t for the blatant racism and forcing more and more Chinese students and workers to return from overseas, it would have been a brain drain on China’s part, to the benefit of the American empire!

    EDIT: as pointed out below, 600-700k is the number of all Chinese students who went overseas every year. The peak in US was ~370k in 2020, then after COVID dropped to ~260k in 2023.

    • Hermes [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      13 hours ago

      Your number of Chinese students that go to the U$ does not match the info I can find, most stuff I see says ~280k/year. There has been a pretty large drop over the past few years, and the number peaked before COVID. This drop in students has caused funding issues for U$ universities, as foreign students pay a lot more in tuition than domestic ones.

      • JustSo [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
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        10 hours ago

        pretty large drop over the past few years

        Yeah the unis in my country are having a big cry about it because they spent the last 20 years increasing executive salaries and not doing much else so without the constant and growing cashflow they’re kind of fucked.

      • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        13 hours ago

        You are correct. The 600-700k is the number of Chinese students who went overseas, not just in the US. It’s also dropped in the US as you said, before COVID it was ~370k students who went to the US in 2020.

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      13 hours ago

      Also don’t forget the US (the entire Imperial Core, really) make conditions in the Global South unsafe, forcing people to migrate the only place that’s safe: the Global North. Then they gatekeep and only let the wealthy or educated in.

      They exterminate the underclass while siphoning capital and brain power, making the situation worse in a feedback loop. Isreal has the same strategy to try and force Jews into moving there. Spread antisemitism abroad, then claim to be the only safe place for Jews.