Quote:
Originally Posted by ernie
Would love to see the Fortune 500 companies announce they will put a hold on all future US expansions until the administration decides to remember what America is supposed to be about.
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Public announcements like that seem highly unlikely to me, but I suspect some companies will move their R&D to countries with more stable politics and a more welcoming atmosphere for foreigners. Top research teams pretty much always headhunt globally, and with the atmosphere being the way it is in the US, even Finns on my FB (mostly super white non-muslims) are currently seriously re-thinking their US travel plans.
Even before Trump, the US border control was considered by many people I know to be one of the most unnerving ones to go through. People have often said they feel much safer travelling to Russia, and nobody has any illusions about Russia not being a terrible dictatorship. But at least it's a dictatorship that generally doesn't harass foreign citizens at the border.
Now that the rules of travel for US can apparently suddenly change midflight and without warning, people are seriously starting to consider whether they want to travel there at all. Some in boycott, others just because they don't want that feeling of insecurity.
Since I know quite a lot of people in IT and science (aka people who travel a lot and actually have trade secrets), my Facebook is just lighting up about the topic. I'm not sure how many in America noticed, but among the many executive orders Trump signed was one that officially scrapped all privacy protection from non-citizens, which just adds to the the paranoid atmosphere
It seems to me that if your research center is physically located in Canada or Germany for example, you'll right now have a lot easier time recruiting than if they're located in the US. And if the global science community more commonly share the kinds of attitudes the people I know are displaying, international conferences will probably in the future be more often held somewhere else.
Seems that the Trump administration is working hard to make US fall from the cutting edge of technology.