U.S. Immigration Policy: Global Competition for Scientific Minds Is Heating Up

U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson recently announced that his government will be overhauling the country’s high-skill visa system to create a new pathway, called the Global Talent visa, for foreign-born scientists and technical practitioners to come and work in the United Kingdom. This is an exciting move for the prospects of U.K. innovation, but also part of a growing trend in the global competition for attracting the best and brightest minds from around the world. The United States already has some compelling advantages in this race, but our current immigration policies are effectively making us run with our feet tied together. We should take a cue from Boris and cut the red tape that binds us.

We can start with the simple premise that while talent is distributed roughly equally across the globe, opportunity is not. And although the United States has some homegrown talent helping lead innovations on the technical frontier in fields like self-driving cars, genetic editing, quantum computing, clean energy, and many other areas, the simple fact is that our progress would be much slower without immigrant founders and scientists. More than half of our billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants, and 80 percent featured immigrants in a core product design or management role. Though immigrants make up only 18 percent of our workforce, they produce 28 percent of our high-quality patents, comprise 31 percent of our Ph.D. population, and have won 39 percent of our Nobel Prizes in science. This is not because immigrants are inherently smarter than the average native-born worker, but because of strong selection effects wherein the smartest or most entrepreneurial people from every country are the individuals most likely to emigrate in search of new opportunities.

CW

About the Author

Caleb Watney

Caleb Watney is a technology-policy fellow at the R Street Institute.

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U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson recently announced that his government will be overhauling the country’s high-skill visa system to create a new pathway, called the Global Talent visa, for foreign-born scientists and technical practitioners to come and work in the United Kingdom. This is an exciting move for the prospects of U.K. innovation, but also part of a growing trend in the global competition for attracting the best and brightest minds from around the world. The United States already has some compelling advantages in this race, but our current immigration policies are effectively making us run with our feet tied together. We should take a cue from Boris and cut the red tape that binds us.

We can start with the simple premise that while talent is distributed roughly equally across the globe, opportunity is not. And although the United States has some homegrown talent helping lead innovations on the technical frontier in fields like self-driving cars, genetic editing, quantum computing, clean energy, and many other areas, the simple fact is that our progress would be much slower without immigrant founders and scientists. More than half of our billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants, and 80 percent featured immigrants in a core product design or management role. Though immigrants make up only 18 percent of our workforce, they produce 28 percent of our high-quality patents, comprise 31 percent of our Ph.D. population, and have won 39 percent of our Nobel Prizes in science. This is not because immigrants are inherently smarter than the average native-born worker, but because of strong selection effects wherein the smartest or most entrepreneurial people from every country are the individuals most likely to emigrate in search of new opportunities.