H-1B Visa, Bible Emotions, Discussing Race with Children

Guest: Ron Hira, PhD, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Howard University, Research Associate, Economic Policy Institute In just four days last week, the US program that issues temporary visas to high-skilled workers reached its annual limit. For several years now, it’s been common for the program to hit its cap in less than a week, but this year applicants for what’s known as “H-1B visas” flooded into the system with extra urgency because the Trump Administration has begun cracking down on the program in an effort to make sure the foreign workers getting the visas aren’t taking the jobs of equally-qualified Americans.

Guest: Maina Chawla Singh, PhD, Scholar-in-Residence, School of International Service, American University The vast majority – 70 percent - of H-1B visas go to workers from one country: India. Today there are more than 2-and-a-half million Indian-born immigrants living in the US. The H-1B visa program has facilitated just the latest wave of them. The first Indian immigrants to the US came more than 100 years ago, mainly as farmers. But there weren’t many and they stopped coming entirely in the early 1900s when the US passed laws effectively banning immigration from Asia.

Guest: Heather Seferovich, Curator of the Education in Zion Gallery, BYU; Emily Darowski, Psychology Librarian, Harold B. Lee Library, BYU Anger, surprise, happiness, disgust, sadness and fear are the basic human emotions psychologists believe are universally recognized across cultures. So, perhaps it’s not surprising that these emotions are well-represented in the Bible. But when a team of researchers at BYU ran the numbers, they came across some intriguing insight. Love, for example, is the Bible’s most-mentioned emotion, followed by Fear. But both appear mostly in the context of humans feeling them. The most common emotion related to deity in the Bible? Anger. Explore the exhibit and data here.

Guest: Deborah Rivas-Drake, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology and Education, University of Michigan Nearly all parents sit down with their kids at some point to have “the talk” about sex, or about drugs. But parents should also be thinking about opening the lines of communication with their kids on the topic of race. And if they do, their kids are more likely to have a diverse group of friends.

Guest: Donna Lee Bowen, Political Science Professor, BYU; John Macfarlane, UVU; Fred Axelgard, Wheatley Institution, BYU In a press conference with the Secretary General of NATO yesterday, President Trump reiterated that the US missile strike on a Syrian airbase in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians was “absolutely. . . the right thing.” And he said he thinks it’s unlikely that Russia was unaware the Syrian government was planning a chemical weapons attack. Russia has been a key supporter of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whom Trump called a “butcher.” What next for US policy in Syria?

Guest: Christopher Carlsmith, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Lowell A college degree is still an important way for Americans to climb the socioeconomic ladder, but recent analysis by researchers at Harvard and Stanford finds the universities that are best at launching poor students into a higher income bracket are also admitting a lot fewer low-income students than they used to.   That’s just the latest data point in the debate over how affordable and accessible the all-important-college education is in America. Believe it or not, this debate goes back centuries - millennia, even - to the very first university, which was founded in Italy in 1088. The University of Bologna has been offering degrees continuously since then and served as an important model for the birth of the university as we know it today.