Feeding into the ongoing debate over Trumps travel ban, the Brookings Institution recently featured a blog that showed how sealing the border could block one of Americas crucial exports: education. Written by Dick Startz, an economics professor at University of California, the blog pointed out that Americas education exports (amounting about $35 billion as of 2015) accounts for 5 percent of Americas total national exports.
Startz argues that blocking the borders risks driving away students and their dollars in two possible ways. The first is straightforward: Effectively excluding students from Muslim countries would mean we lose a lot of customers, he wrote.
The second way that building barriers hurts us [America] is by making students from all countries feel unwelcome. Ignoring the issue of building goodwill toward the United States, the fact is that universities around the world would love to out-market us, wrote Startz pointing to the growing competition by British, Canadian, European and Australian universities in the global education exports market.
Another important aspect that Startz did not mention was the impact of blockage on Americas soft power. It is a foregone conclusion that Americas soft power is harder than its hard power. If America wants to remain relevant in a world that is increasing tilting to the east, it ought to remain focussed on its soft power. And what better way to boost soft power than education exports, and by virtue of it, culture exports.
For Pakistan, there will some concerns amongst those who desire to pursue higher education in the United States. Data pertaining to Pakistans country-wise education imports are not publicly available; however, there is sufficient anecdotal evidence that shows that most Pakistanis go to the US for their higher studies, followed by UK, Australia, Canada and Europe.
Should Trump ban follow, it would hurt both prospective and existing Pakistani students in America. However, one positive externality from the ban may be that it might create a local demand for better education, just as one positive externality of 9/11 was the return of expatriate Pakistanis and along with it, their liquidity and skills.
Also, in so far as the economics discipline is concerned, the Trump ban may force budding Pakistani economists to gain training in the UK or Europe, which may in turn help attenuate the hegemony of quant-heavy American economic thought in Pakistans business and economic community. This could in turn help bring normativity, culture, and history into economic discourse.
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