It’s key to broad innovation.

*they are risk-taking, meaning that any squo uncertainty isn’t enough.

Jeremy Neufeld 24, Senior Immigration Fellow at Institute for Progress, 4/30/2024, “The Immigration Advantage in the U.S.-China Strategic Contest for STEM Talent”, Vol. 19, Issue 2, p. 143-146

Thus, the United States has a powerful asymmetric advantage: the ability to recruit international talent. First, advanced STEM immigrants directly apply their disproportionately impressive skills. Despite being only 16% of inventors in the United States, immigrants account for 30% of patents.10 They also tend to be more entrepreneurial than those born in the United States, starting companies of all sizes at higher rates.11 These impressive characteristics can be explained easily by selection: the United States is drawing some of the best STEM talent from the global population—and the most risk-taking individuals are interested in coming to the country.

Second, advanced STEM immigrants contribute ideas that make the people they collaborate with more productive. While immigrant inventors directly produced 23% of innovative output from 1990 to 2016, they made U.S.-born collaborators more productive as well, raising their indirect contribution to total U.S. innovation to 36%.12 Furthermore, they help upskill those born in the United States. In higher education, international students subsidize the tuition of U.S.-born students, making higher education opportunities more affordable for them.13 In addition, international experts help directly train STEM students. In semiconductor manufacturing, for example, experienced experts from Taiwan are helping instruct the next generation of talent in the United States through both formal training programs and on-the-job training.

Contributions to innovation have concrete security and defense implications that inform great-power politics surrounding the global competition for technology leadership. China has declared its intent to secure leadership in many fields, but its success (and that of the United States) varies by field. In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), China aspires to take the lead by 2030, but its ability to do so is not apparent.14 Importantly, about half of the world’s top AI talent is based in the United States. As the annual report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) reported in 2023, “a select few universities are driving China’s AI chip and quantum research, although these centers are largely staffed by researchers returning from abroad.”15 In biotechnology, the United States’ lead is strong, thanks in no small part to immigration: about half of advanced graduates in the field are international students. The United States’ lead in nanotechnology is also clear, despite Chinese advances. However, in quantum computing, another critical emerging technology field, China may have already taken the lead. After spending much more on quantum information science, it has seen patents in the field exceed those of the United States.16 As the USCC concluded in 2017, “China has closed the technological gap with the United States in quantum information science—a sector the United States has long dominated.”17

U.S. choices about attracting and retaining foreign STEM talent are deciding the trajectories of numerous critical technologies. For example, Erdal Arikan, a Turkish graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose work contributed to a major innovative breakthrough in AI, sought opportunities to stay in the United States but was forced to leave the country because he could not obtain a visa. He was then recruited by Huawei, where his insights helped bring about Chinese 5G dominance.18 According to the Defense Innovation Board, “China has taken the lead in 5G development…[and] China’s handset and internet applications and services are likely to become dominant.”19 This could have been avoided had green cards been more available upon graduation.20 As another example, mRNA vaccine technology was developed in the United States because biochemistry pioneer Katalin Karikó was allowed to come to the country in 1985, which was before the United States capped H-1B visas in 1990 and adopted visa rules in 1998 that would likely have barred her.21

Semiconductor manufacturing and supercomputing is another critical technology area in which China has been making important strides. In 2004, the country had less than 3% of the (known) top five hundred non-distributed supercomputers in the world. As of November 2023, it had 20%.22 In fact, China led the world in the number of such systems from 2016 to 2021, before the Biden administration’s export controls on certain chips.

Talent bottlenecks are upending plans to onshore fabs in the United States. In general, the industry should be a poster child for the role that international talent can play in driving forward cutting-edge industries. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, and Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, are both immigrants, as is Andy Grove, Intel’s former CEO. However, without changes to immigration policy to accompany the increase in funding for fabs, the United States will lose ground. Mass production at TSMC’s Arizona fab, for example, has faced delays because of skilled worker shortages.23 Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, expressed doubts that opening fabs in the United States would ever make sense, pointing to talent shortages.24

This pattern is not unique to semiconductor manufacturing or 5G development but is visible in quantum computing and AI as well.25 Even in projects funded by the Defense Department, where the need for security clearances makes naturalization a prerequisite for employment, 37% of the advanced STEM degree holders working on these projects are foreign-born.26 Altogether, the Department of Defense relies on 100,000 foreign-born STEM graduates at any given time for projects it funds.27 In broader defense-related industries, the number reaches 50%.28 Furthermore, recent research has shown that advanced STEM immigrants in defense industries are making more on average than their U.S.-born coworkers, indicating that they occupy key, high-value roles.29