Immigrants provide unique benefits to innovation across the board.
Savchuk 23[Katia Savchuk is an award-winning freelance magazine journalist and a former staff reporter at Forbes and is citing work from several researchers. Said researchers are as follows: Rebecca Diamon is a professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon is a PhD student at Stanford GSB. Beatriz Pousada is a PhD student at Stanford. Shai Bernstein is from the Harvard Business School. Timothy McQuade is from the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. 3-13-2023, "A New Look at Immigrants’ Outsize Contribution to Innovation in the U.S.," Stanford Graduate School of Business, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/new-look-immigrants-outsize-contribution-innovation-us aawh]
The researchers found that immigrants generate patents across a broad swath of sectors, including computers, electronics, chemicals, and medicine. They also discovered that, while all inventors reach peak productivity in their late 30s and early 40s, immigrants decline from that peak at a slower rate than U.S.-born inventors over the rest of their careers, a disparity that remains unexplained.
The Immigrant Innovation Gap
Diamond believes there are several potential reasons for the innovation gap between immigrant and native-born inventors. One is brain drain: “There’s likely a pretty strong positive selection in terms of the types of people from every country that end up as high-skilled professionals with U.S. visas,” she says.
Another factor is cross-border collaboration: The researchers observed that foreign-born inventors are more likely to work with inventors based in other countries and cite foreign technologies in their patents. “Different pools of knowledge get imported by immigration, and diversity in background is good for innovation,” Diamond says.
Diamond and her team also found evidence that immigrant inventors are more likely to live in innovation hubs, such as Silicon Valley or Boston, and to work on patents in cutting-edge technology sectors. Still, the researchers estimate that these two factors explain just 30% of the gap in patent output.
Immigrant inventors’ contributions go beyond their own work — they also make their native-born collaborators more productive, the researchers discovered. To arrive at this finding, Diamond and her team identified inventors who died before they turned 60 and examined the output of people who had co-authored a patent with that individual before their early death. Compared to a control group of inventors that did not lose a collaborator, surviving inventors produced 10% fewer patents after the death of their co-author. The effect was larger for inventors whose deceased co-author was an immigrant — their productivity declined by 17%. This gap persisted even after the researchers controlled for a number of factors, such as the productivity of the deceased inventors.
“At the end of the day, we weren’t really able to explain the gap,” Diamond says. “It seems there’s something special about being an immigrant. Their knowledge has these huge external effects on who they work with, and what they know impacts what their collaborators can produce in the future.”