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show their readiness to act.
It
went the wrong way.
This is one reason to try making a bridge to the neoconservative and
nationalists in Germany. These people have such a weak resonance in the
more important parts of the political and economic discourse of Ger–
many, because they are anti-Westernn. And being anti-Western, I think,
is a very deeply-rooted experience of my generation and of the genera–
tion of our sons and daughters.
It
is a policy which leads in the wrong
direction, and without a real option. But maybe this kind of muddling–
through perspective is much more adequate than great visions, which in
the past always proved to be wrong visions.
Mary Sladek:
Today, there is an anti-immigration mentality in the
American scientific establishment. I'm wondering about the kind of wel–
come those who emigrated before World War II received in the scien–
tific establishment here?
Mitchell Ash:
I'm astounded to hear that you think there is an anti–
immigrant mentality in the scientific establishment of the United States
today, given that roughly half of the Ph.Ds in natural sciences go to
foreign-born people. I don't see anybody trying to prevent their
admission to Ph.D. programs. Americans are either not as qualified or
not interested in getting Ph.D.s in the sciences, because the money in
industry is better, so more positions inevitably go to, for example, Asians.
Mary Sladek:
What you say is true. In many ways the foreign-born
graduate students who come and get degrees here are seen as cheap
labor. They accept lower stipends than American students. And in some
disciplines, in the physical sciences particularly, I have been told that this
is a problem because there aren't enough American-born applicants. Also
there's a concern about a brain-drain. People come and get their Ph.D.s
here and then leave, or else they stay and thereby theoretically take jobs
that should go to Americans.
Mitchell Ash:
Briefly, the response of the scientific community in the
1930s to the emigres was deeply ambivalent. To put it bluntly, it's no
coincidence that the concept of intellectual capital was invented in that
period. The emigres were regarded as a species of intellectual capital that
one could harvest, or pull in for one's own purposes. The word
"investment" appears again and again in the documents of the Rocke–
feller Foundation's files, when they talk about giving grants to emigres,
whether that person is or isn't a good investment is the central question.
Now, that doesn't mean that humanitarian impulses played no role at
