Or, there's risk to being in their home country where academic freedom might not really be a thing.
it's like why if you show serious promise in soccer at a young age, you go to Europe as soon as you can - you will be better developed there in a more mature environment as opposed to, say, the USA where you can only get decent coaching in a few major cities, and even then the gulf between the coaching at a top Spanish or English club versus an American one is huge. Or if you show promise in tennis at a young age, you get your ass to Florida as soon as you are able to.
Also, smarts needed to bootstrap modern infrastructure from scratch with limited resources are different than smarts needed to design a popular app, for example.
Americans built modern infrastructure with our limited 'average' brains.
Should be simple for actual smart people.
Operation Dropshot and Unthinkable called for hundreds of nukes and conventional bombs to be dropped on Soviet cities to, "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire."
All in all, I don't even have a dog in the fight, but people like Qian Xuesen won't become retarded if they're expelled from the US. If I remember correctly, something like a third of all top-tier AI researchers are Chinese. If you count all those with an immigration background, they'll be close to 50-70%. They will simply create companies and products that compete and take market share from American companies.
Are Americans - the country that votes out presidents for rising gas prices - willing to make do with a lower standard of living? Because that'd what you'll get when some the world's best innovators are no longer based in your country.
Trade and innovation benefits all of mankind. A rising tide lifts all ships. Having multiple countries becoming successful instead of the US simply monopolizing talent would benefit the world.
> Glad Qian Xuesen helped China improve their missile innovation.
Nuclear Deterrence should be spread far and wide so no one bad actor can get into power and bully others.
Which is indeed a benefit for their countries.
And is a loss for the US.
The brain drain was real and the US was the beneficiary and that may be ending soon.
Not sure what your point is? Are you happy that the US will be worse off than it was before?