Hooray for brain drain

Insights by Stanford Business rightly touts the enormous contributions of immigrants to U.S. prosperity. 

 

I guess we knew that smart people want to come to this country. But the sheer magnitude of immigrant contributions to invention and entrepreneurial success are enormous.

The United States has long touted itself as a nation built by immigrants. Yet there has never been a precise measure of immigrants’ contribution to the country’s economic and technological progress. Around the time that President Donald Trump was moving to curb employment visas for skilled foreigners, economist Rebecca Diamond and a team of researchers set out to examine this unresolved question.

To find the answer, the researchers looked at the output of nearly 880,000 Americans who patented inventions between 1990 and 2016. They found that immigrants made an outsize contribution to innovation in the U.S. While they comprised 16% of inventors, immigrants were behind 23% of the patents issued over these years.

It wasn’t just a matter of quantity: The share of patents immigrants produced was slightly higher when weighted by the number of citations each patent received over the next three years, a key measure of their quality and utility. Moreover, immigrants were responsible for a quarter of the total economic value of patents granted in that period, as measured by the stock market’s reaction to new patents.

Obviously, Stanford and Silicon Valley focus on the large number of skilled inventors attracted here -- but despite everything -- despite Trump, Biden, and whatever other exclusionists rule the roost -- this country remains the desired destination for people with "get up and go" from across the planet. Even newcomer unskilled laborers are often the most capable of their families, off to seek a better life, however hard that may be. And we get the benefit.

For all our problems, a goodly quantity of people manage to bring their drive and their hopes to this country. You see some of this in Europe, but you sure don't see the global best and brightest trying to immigrate to China ... this is what we do here.

Yes, this is brain drain from across the globe. The only way to stop it -- short of walls and violence and cutting off our noses to spite our faces -- is to help other countries become equally attractive. That seems a long shot.