Though I had a hard time sustaining attention during the extended football analogy at the beginning of
this article, I was rewarded with some eye-popping statistics about the Nobel Prizes awarded to legal immigrants to the U.S. First, there was this pithy observation from the guy who so closely resembles our Bad Orange President:
When hundreds of Jews left Germany, including 16 who had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Adolf Hitler declared, “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!”
Your terms are acceptable, as they say these days.There follow some observations on recipients of Nobels in economics that I will pass over in dignified silence on the ground that competence is no more associated with prizes in that field than in the field of world peace. The article then gets to the real meat:
Of the 117 Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics since 2000, 45 went to immigrants. Since 1960, nearly a hundred immigrants have won the “hard science” Nobels. Legal immigrants. In some years, such as 2016, the majority of people in the entire world recognized by the Nobel Committee were American immigrants.
As the author argues, we might want to look harder at EB (employment-based) green card policy while we're tightening up the border obstacles to Tren de Aragua members in the next four years.
3 comments:
AVI linked this piece the other day as a counter to the idea of increasing skilled immigration:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/increasing-skilled-immigration-is?publication_id=828904&post_id=150203597&isFreemail=true&r=hjvfh&triedRedirect=true
I think you could usefully strike a middle position between the claims:
1) Kaine's proposal to accept 5,000 top scientist defectors from China is rational, although that would entail significant counterintelligence costs to ensure you hadn't imported 5,000 spies on US scientific endeavor (though we do that and more anyway via college admissions from the PRC).
2) We don't, however, have the same competitive interest vis a vis India (say).
3) Therefore, one might both endorse a general principle of holding down on immigration in order to prefer the development of internal talent and American wages, while also making an exception for scientists from hostile foreign powers.
Seems to me that the number you'd need to people even somewhat likely to win a Nobel in the sciences is pretty small, and you could do that without handing out large numbers of visas to students or whoever.
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