“We can’t hold scientific meetings here [in the United States] anymore because foreign scientists can’t get visas,” a top oceanographer at the University of San Diego recently told Richard Florida (Washington Monthly, January/February). And that isn’t the worst news. “The [foreign] graduate students I have taught at several major universities–Ohio State, Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon–have always been among the first to point out the benefits of studying and doing research in the United States. But their impressions have changed dramatically over the past year. They now complain of being hounded by the immigration agencies as potential threats to security, and that America is abandoning its standing as an open society. Many are thinking of leaving for foreign schools, and they tell me that their friends and colleagues back home are no longer interested in coming to the United States for their education but are actively seeking out universities in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere.”
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In the name of preserving farmland they’ve reduced the price of yet another thing a farmer might be able to sell at a profit–his land. Writing on farmland-preservation policies in the greater metropolitan area (“Policy Profiles,” December), J. Dixon Esseks of Northern Illinois University applauds DeKalb County’s policy of strict agricultural zoning. The county set the minimum size of a lot in agricultural areas at 40 acres, and Esseks notes that a 1997 study found that these lots “sold for less than other parcels of farmland. In other words, the real estate market took DeKalb County’s zoning seriously.”
