Episode Details

Vanilla Ice’s real name is Robert Van Winkle.

The man who gave America its most inescapable song about ice is legally named for a character whose entire contribution to literature was sleeping through the thing that mattered and waking to a country he no longer recognized.

He is the right patron saint for this, because withdrawal is never announced. Nobody holds a press conference. It happens while you are asleep, and it gets named afterward, by historians, in books called Decline and Fall.

There are two ICEs in American industrial life. The first is the internal combustion engine — the asset Detroit already owns and has now retreated onto. The second is the cold that a formed engineer meets when they consider coming here. Different reporters, different pages, same story.

Here is the story.

A country can get formed engineers exactly two ways. It can buy them — import people another country paid to raise, at the moment they turn useful, for the price of a plane ticket and an open door. Or it can make them — take its own eighteen-year-olds and stand beside them for fifteen years until they can judge without supervision.

That is the entire menu. Germany makes. Japan makes. China has made, for twenty years, at a scale with no precedent.

America bought. Brilliantly, at enormous margin, for sixty years, and never wrote it down anywhere. Now it is withdrawing from buying, and it has not started making, and both withdrawals have the same cause — which is not immigration and is not batteries. This country has developed an allergy to holding any asset that pays out later than the term of the person who authorized it. Buying formation pays back in a decade. Making formation pays back in fifteen years. Extraction pays Friday.

That’s the argument.

The best business this country ever ran

In the late 1980s I flew into Pittsburgh to start a PhD in industrial engineering. Arjun Jayaraman met me at the airport. Today he is a co-founder of the institute I helped start. That day he was a man who showed up for a stranger.

Somebody met me. That’s not sentiment. That’s a business model.

India paid for my first eighteen years — the schooling, the food, the electricity, the whole crushing subsidy of raising a human to the point of usefulness. My family paid the rest. America paid for a doctorate and collected thirty-five years: Buick City, Lansing Grand River, Stuttgart, Chennai, and now a plant in Wooster, Ohio.

Thirty-five years of formed judgment, and this country never made the deposit.

That was not charity. It was the highest-margin arrangement in the history of industrial policy. America did not have to form its engineers. It only had to be worth coming to. Be the place where the work is real and the door is open, and finished people arrive on their own — funded by another treasury, showing up at exactly the age when they start producing, never appearing on any balance sheet because nobody bought them.

Every rival had to actually raise its engineers. America just had to be attractive.

We are closing that business now, by two mechanisms, and only one of them is written down.

Withdrawal One: from buying

New F-1 student visa issuances are down roughly 36 percent year over year. From India — the country that has been paying the first eighteen years of America’s engineering bill since before I got on the plane — summer issuances fell 60 percent. NAFSA surveyed 149 American institutions this spring: new international graduate enrollment down an average of 24 percent.

The University of New Haven lost around three thousand graduate students in two years, opened a $35 million hole that was 17 percent of its budget, cut ten academic programs, and stopped contributing to its employees’ retirement accounts.

Those are American jobs, gone,