> The country has enough domestic eager brains and the cultural capital to compensate later for this temporary dip.

No, not really. I mean, we potentially could, but not at the scale needed to run our intended research programs, and not with the state of education as it is -- the top career goals for US highschoolers are athlete, youtuber, musician, actor... they want fame and fortune. And why shouldn't they, that's what America tells them is important.

Then, we load those who do go to college with so much debt, graduate education is not financially possible for most of them. Careers in research require higher degrees and a decade of study, it's just not worth it when you have $50k-$100k in debt upon graduating, and a graduate stipend is like $2k a month.

At my university, we fill our masters and PhD ranks with international students. Even if we admitted 100% of the domestic students who apply each year, we wouldn't have a full cohort. And if we did do that, and they all did attend, the 15 other schools they applied to would fall short.

When I started engineering undergrad 20 years ago, they told us domestic students grad school only makes sense if you want to be a professor. Why? They put the numbers up! Opportunity cost!

Of course, now the goalposts have moved: American talent must be worse because they don’t have these degrees which are required of foreign students to get in the country. And, of course, grad school working conditions are notably terrible. Exploitable labor lowers working conditions.