Immigration and American Innovation

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Goldman Sachs's economic team predicted last year that China's Gross Domestic Product will overtake America's in the year 2025. Unless the United States makes significant changes to its immigration policy, you can bet on China's ascension happening even sooner than expected. The U.S. Government has made it virtually impossible for foreign scientists and mathematicians—even those educated in the United States—to live and work here. Rather than find constructive solutions, some members of Congress prefer a purely restrictionist approach, encouraging oppressively strict standards for visa approval and immigration audits against U.S. employers of top foreign talent. At the same time, industry has meekly subjected itself to the administration's brutal attack against U.S. companies. Top U.S. employers are severely restricted when they try to hire the best and the brightest foreign-born scientists and engineers, even if they graduate at the top of their class in America's universities.

Now, with a record of repeatedly shooting itself in the foot in the vital arenas of innovation and investment, the United States is poised to shoot itself in the head. China has already surpassed America as the world's largest generator of investment capital, with about $2 trillion to America's $1.4 trillion, and only 41% of Americans believe the United States is staying ahead of China on innovation. Since U.S. students are falling far behind in math and science, you might expect that we would beg intelligent international students to stay; sadly, the contrary is true. Rather than languishing in waiting lines of five to ten years for a green card, most of the top science and math graduates opt for jobs in their home countries. To make matters worse, immigration agency bureaucrats aggressively push a protectionist agenda, looking for every possible way to deny visa petitions for scientists and mathematicians and send them back home. Naturally, but unfortunately for America, other rapidly growing economies are eager to invest in home grown talent to fuel the future of their countries. For example, China now offers recruitment bonuses of 1 million RMB (about $150,000) to foreign-educated Chinese scientists, academics, financial experts, and MBAs who opt to return to China.

Amid the current emotional fervor of the economic downturn, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that employment-based immigration has historically spurred innovation instead of taking jobs away from Americans. In the 1930s, Germany led the world in terms of scientific development, much of it a direct result of work by German Jews. In the ensuing decade, during the ramp-up to World War II, at least 100,000 of these German Jews fled to the United States. By the 1950s, Albert Einstein and his colleagues had built an American empire of top universities and research scientists, a magnet for scientific advancements that catapulted the U.S. into stratospheric levels of accomplishment and innovation. In 1965, America abolished the racist policy barring Indian and Chinese immigrants and an explosion of innovation pushed America even further ahead of the rest of the world. In the early 1980s, immigrant scientists in Silicon Valley helped usher in another new wave of American scientific ingenuity and prosperity, during which time 75% of all graduates of India's top Institute of Technology ended up in the United States. Now, by comparison, the number is less than 10% and falling.

Today's anti-immigration activists, including some in Congress, are actively working to exclude top foreign scientists from the United States. China and India eagerly take advantage of this self-destructive xenophobia. Current policies are driving the best and brightest foreign graduates back home, rather than enticing them to stay and contribute to the United States by giving them a reasonable path to a green card. We haven't changed the quota for admitting scientists in 20 years. America needs to wake up, though it may already be too late to catch China and India. Conservative columnist David Brooks recently wrote a New York Times op-ed on formulating an “innovation agenda,” in which one of his critical action points is to increase the H-1B quota to attract skilled foreign workers to the United States. And perhaps Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said it best: “by opening doors to more people with top technical skills, America can keep companies here. [Y]ou would have more innovation here, and you would have more growth here... [T]o shun them is to ignore a huge resource.” Above all, we need to stop listening to emotionally appealing but nonsensical anti-immigrant restrictionists. Instead, we’re better off listening to top economists and forward-looking political analysts to keep this country economically vibrant and competitive through immigration of skilled workers.


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