Oh august old Weekly Standard, what has become of your aristocratic pages? Everybody’s written their own embarrassing paragraph or two, but surely Fred Barnes must be feeling a bit the tomfool after this wild gybe in a fawning issue devoted to the Arendt of Alaska, the Hypatia of Hill Country, Sarah Palin.

Whatever else the 2008 presidential campaign may produce, it has created a new Republican star–Palin–a political natural who’s at ease in front of crowds and whose cheerfulness, self-confidence, and optimism haven’t slackened in the face of unusually harsh–and often highly personal– attacks by Democrats and the mainstream media

Oh, that Fred Barnes, what with his good advice and his knowing all about the commonfolk. So it’s not so surprising to find the Standard now engaged in the sort of squid-like distraction techniques that have come to be a standard move of a conservative moment caught in the throes of irrelevance and idiocy. And what better way for the Standard to have a jaunt around the old glory block than to trot out two Ivy League guys talking about how smart people are awesome?

Out from behind the couch pop the heads of Sahil Mahtani and Pierpaolo Barbieri, two of our distinguished and beblazered Harvard colleagues. Immigrants both and smart people both, they are happy to point out to you that it is exactly these type of people who drive America forward. By defining immigration upwards—that is, by opening the gates to those with technical certificates rather than tattoos—we’ll do exactly what is in the American economic interest. Namely, suck the talent out of the world with a jealous joy usually reserved for silly straws.

Extending visas to foreigners who already have the requisite skills and degrees would contribute to a virtuous cycle of higher GDP and higher tax revenues, translating into a better quality of life for the average American.

What’s curious to me about this is that this is an explicitly nationalist argument coming from people who are not American nationals. If your rubric of values places the success of the United States economy at the very top of political usefulness, then perhaps this argument makes sense. But it is a deliberately confrontational and anti-international stance to make. It makes the argument, more or less, that the United States should operate in the manner of a sports team, in which the depletion of its rivals’ resources and the accumulation of its own are equivalents. It remains true that the United States is not, in fact, a baseball team, and its humane responsibilities are more universal than a “go us” attitude might allow.

But leave morality aside for a moment (a trick we should be familiar with when talking about economic decisions) and there’s several purely rational problems with the talent-immigration argument. First, it assumes that a portfolio of credentials is a good barometer of economic promise. No doubt educational attainment is closely linked to easy employment in an “information economy”¹. But the two are not coextensive. Certainly there are many without formal degrees who have made crucial contributions not only economically but culturally, scientifically, and informally to the American brand. Second, it misses the point that the neoliberal machine is quickly running towards a wall. It is unsustainable geopolitically to assume a continued trend towards the accumulation of power and leisure in developed countries and the offloading of material work onto developing countries. At some point, this cannot help but reach a breaking point. As such, the continued importation of second-order jobs to the United States and the exportation of first-order ones is perhaps not the strategic asset we might at first imagine.

We’re glad to have you in the United States, Sahil and Pierpaolo—how would the Crimson‘s coal mines turn a profit without you? But we are just as glad to have your less-educated countrymen.

¹ One of my least-favorite terms.