1/ I'm seeing a lot of tweets about the Tom Cotton proposal to block Chinese student visas. One jarring thing is the number of them making the "business case" for keeping Chinese students - trotting out statistics about how much they add to the productivity of their labs. I get

2/ the motivation for that kind of argumentation; the "business case for diversity" has become a popular way to justify policies that diversify organizations. I guess my problem with that line of argumentation is the broader issue that it highlights in this nation- an issue

3/ that is always lurking beneath the surface of so much of our discourse - whether it is "worth it" to spend money on our schools, "worth it" to fund a health care system, "worth it" ...to cover the other basic needs required for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

4/ The issue is that we don't seem to inherently value lives; at least not all of them. Some lives only matter if they have a clear contribution to the bottom line. We can't just look at a look at a proposal like Cotton's and just say - it's racist and therefore plain wrong. We

5/ instead get all wrapped up in trying to quantify the benefits and costs of that racism to decide if it's "worth it." A few years ago I listened to a @Radiolab More Perfect episode that I found upsetting, not because I think it's wrong, but because I think it's right, and...

6/ therefore kinda sad. The episode is called "One Nation, Under Money," and is about the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution. Those 16 words are what we've used to make decisions about all kinds of social issues ranging from racial discrimination to https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/radiolab-presents-more-perfect-one-nation-under-money

7/ domestic violence. What makes me sad is that, as @JadAbumrad
put it, "hopefully we're Americans with principles that matter, you know? That we- we believe in equality, we believe in racial justice. But really we just believe in money."

That's what's frustrating about the

8/ visa discussion. Instead of saying it's wrong to discriminate against Chinese people, we're trying to compute the cost of that discrimination for the GDP. Implicitly that implies the discrimination is only a problem if it costs us too much money.

/end rant.