Immigration CP - Northwestern 2024

Immigration CP – NDI 2024
Notes
Strategy Notes
This CP argues that the most important factor in beating China in innovation/innovating in general is not marginal improvements to our patent system, but rather increasing the number of highly skilled immigrants in the US. The CP tests the “strengthen its protection of… intellectual property rights” part of the resolution and competes off the net benefits to that.
While this is limited to the patent section of the topic, I feel that the CP is fairly good at screening out advantages without very specific evidence about patent reform.
It’s worth noting that there is debate over whether or not recent developments in patent law are more important to any industry (specifically the biotech industry), than anything else. This means that in order to win the solvency debate, it’s worth debating the case at the same time as you push on the CP.
Nevertheless, building a narrative backed by evidence that skilled immigrants are overwhelmingly intelligent risk takers that innovate across a broad spectrum of sectors is something I think a reasonably trained 2N could do.
Something that is worth looking into is using different planks to solve other planks. For example, reading an AI solvency card on a biotech aff, and then reading a card that says that AI will revolutionize the biotech industry.
The net benefits are the camp DAs. However, I think that there is enough evidence in the immigration literature that will allow a clever 2N to make the net-benefit be whatever they need it to be, whether that be Politics or Inflation.
The net benefit card might be too strong and may prove that the permutation is better than the CP alone. Be careful in card selection and narrative building.
Something that is worth looking into is reading the ban IP/patents bad CP on this CP as a plank, and then strategically kicking and spinning as needed based on the 2AC coverage.
Cool Examples
Albert Einstein (Germany) — Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Nikola Tesla (Serbia) — Expansion of AC current
Sergey Brin (Russia) — Cofounder of Google
Andrew Grove (Hungarian) — Helped found Intel
Carl Djerassi — Father of “the pill”/birth control
Enrico Fermi (Italy) – Led the team that created the world's first controlled nuclear reaction, a crucial step towards the development of nuclear energy.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (Germany) – Nuclear Bomb man (second gen)
Amar Bose (Bengal) — Engineer and founder of Bose (second gen)
Katalin Karikó (Hungary) – Biochemist and inventor of mRNA vaccines (which fixed Covid)
John Francis Queeny (Ireland) – founder of Monsanto, the premier GMO company in the US (second gen)
Éleuthère Irénée du Pont (France) – founder of the DuPont Chemical Company
Anecdotally, looking at top-tier biotech companies like Pfizer and Moderna and just scrolling through their top-executives shows a lot of immigrants.
Neg---Immigration CP
1NC
The United States federal government should
remove green card caps on high skilled immigrants, especially those with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees,
clarify and reform immigration rules on visas for high skilled immigrants with STEM degrees,
increase administrative funding and efforts to reduce green card backlogs.
Winning the STEM innovation race is impossible without the CP.
Toner 22 [Helen Toner is Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). She also serves in an uncompensated capacity on the non-profit board of directors for OpenAI. 3-25-2022, "Foreign STEM Talent is the Key to Future U.S. Competitiveness," Aspen Institute, https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/STEM-Talent_Final.pdf aawh]
U.S. technological leadership in the second half of the twentieth century did not derive only from federal government investments in research and development, nor from the relatively large and well-educated U.S. population. What really gave the United States an edge was the uniquely high proportion of the world’s best STEM talent that chose to make this country their home, drawn by America’s political freedoms, high standard of living, world-leading research universities, and favorable corporate environment. Scratch the surface of any major U.S. technological achievement and you will find immigrants involved. Since 1901, almost half of the world’s Nobel Laureates have been U.S.-based scientists, about 10 times more than the size alone of the U.S. population would predict; in turn, immigrants represent a third of the U.S.-based laureates, also a disproportionately large share.1 Immigrants are even more over-represented among successful entrepreneurs: more than half of U.S. startups valued at over $1 billion have an immigrant founder, as do more than half of the Forbes 2019 list of “most promising” artificial intelligence startups.2
In other words, for much of the twentieth century the combination of U.S. homegrown talent and highly-skilled immigrants added up to a significant scientific and technological advantage for the United States. This advantage is now eroding. As technological competition with China heats up, the United States must recognize high-skill immigration as the core national security issue that it is.
China, long home to the world’s largest population but lacking economic and educational clout, has now come into its own as a technological power. Leveraging science and technology to boost national power has long been a major component of Chinese government planning documents, and in the 2010s these efforts began to bear fruit. Many of China’s flashier achievements, including high-speed rail, monkey cloning, and 5G dominance, have drawn international attention. At least as important, however, is the underlying infrastructure that has powered these achievements, such as its increasingly capable education system.
China has made and continues to make major, sustained investments in its education system, including in higher education. The result is that China now vastly outproduces the U.S. in STEM graduates each year at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate levels (Figure 1). The rise of high-end doctorate education, and its associated R&D, is the result of deliberate actions by the Chinese government. For example, at the government’s behest, more than 1,300 new PhD programs were created between 2003 and 2007, producing a spurt of new home-grown Chinese research scientists.3 Higher education spending by the Chinese Ministry of Education roughly doubled in the years between 2012 and 2021, supporting a large increase in enrollments.4 Figure 1c combines data on current enrollment patterns with historical graduation rates to project how this will lead to another huge increase in STEM PhD graduates by 2025.
What these charts make clear, in addition to the success of Chinese educational reforms, is how indispensable foreign STEM graduates are for the United States. Improving U.S. domestic education is often raised as an alternative to increasing high-skill immigration. These charts make plain how untenable that strategy is. Make no mistake: building a modern, equitable education system for American-born students is an urgent priority. But no matter how highly we prioritize education reforms, or how successfully we improve outcomes for domestic students, this alone cannot compensate for the U.S.-China discrepancy in STEM talent. This should not be a surprise: China’s population is more than four times larger than the United States’, and it still has room to grow before it reaches U.S. per capita education levels. It is inescapable that as the Chinese education system grows and matures enough to provide opportunities to Chinese students, the United States will only be able to keep up by drawing talent from all around the globe.
Fortunately, the United States is in the enviable position of being a highly desirable destination for top scientists and engineers. Surveys show that around 60 percent of international scientists say they would consider moving to the United States, versus only around 10 percent who would consider China.5 Immigrants are drawn by the political freedoms and high standard of living enjoyed by U.S. residents, as well as by the prospect of joining world-leading research groups at U.S. universities and working for (or starting) innovative U.S. companies. What’s more, China recognizes this dynamic as a major threat to its technological plans: complaining, for instance, that “the number of top talents lost in China ranks first in the world.”6
Against this backdrop, current U.S. immigration policies amount to shooting ourselves in the foot. Numerical caps, unclear requirements, increasingly lengthy processing times, and other problems are both a barrier and a deterrent to top STEM talent deciding to move to the United States. With countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom revising immigration rules to better attract these immigrants, it becomes even more urgent for the United States to keep up.
2NC---Solvency
2NC---Extension
Innovation can only be solved by increasing high skilled immigration, that’s Toner. It’s the US’s unique advantage in tech development. Absent that, China has 4 times the STEM college graduates, and 2 times the PhD graduates, ensuring that we instantly lose if we can’t attract international talent.
Solvency – General
It’s key to broad innovation.
*immigrants are key to every industry
*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
Immigration reform is key to solving global tech leadership. Patents can’t fix workforce shortages.
Ahern et al. 22 [Jayson P. Ahern is the former Acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection from February 2009 to March 2010. He was Assistant Commissioner for Field Operations from March 2003 to August 2007. He is joined by about 2 dozen other national security professionals, including former generals, and defense secretaries. 5/9/2022, "Members of the Bipartisan Innovation Act Conference Committee", https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21947011/national-security-stem-talent-letter.pdf aawh]
Global STEM talent drives American leadership in critical sectors that underpin the defense industrial base, from computing to aerospace. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. graduate students in artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductor-related programs were born abroad. The U.S. remains the most desirable destination for the world’s best international scientists and engineers — a feat that China, despite extensive investments, has not come close to replicating. In today’s technology competition, the most powerful and enduring asymmetric advantage America has is its ability to attract and retain the world’s best and brightest. The Chinese Communist Party recognizes this; Chinese sources say that U.S. expansion of its international talent pipelines “would pose a huge challenge to China.”
Bottlenecks in the U.S. immigration system risk squandering this advantage. Today, top Indian STEM graduates are projected to face decades of wait time before being issued a green card. Such delays are driving talent away — more than half of AI PhDs who leave the country after graduating say they did so because of immigration issues. Even for those who manage to stay, citizenship, a requirement for many jobs in the defense-industrial base, can be elusive. The risks for American leadership are clear. Earlier this year, the chip giant TSMC announced it would delay construction of a major new semiconductor plant in Arizona due to a shortage of skilled professionals. In 2021, a plurality of National Defense Industrial Association members reported that the U.S. human capital gap is the single most vulnerable part of their supply chain, and recent studies show half of advanced STEM workers in the defense industrial base were born abroad. America’s efforts to onshore critical supply chains will not succeed unless it also onshores the talent necessary to compete.
China is racing ahead in growing its domestic STEM talent pipelines. It has doubled its higher education budget in less than a decade. Chinese universities are rapidly climbing in the global rankings. While the United States began this century with a comfortable lead, China now has double the annual U.S. STEM master’s output and will hit double the number of U.S. STEM PhDs within the next three years — and its growth, in both quantity and quality, shows no signs of slowing down.
This conference committee, as it reconciles differences between America COMPETES (H.R. 4521) and USICA (S. 1260), has a critical opportunity to tackle the self-inflicted drag that immigration bottlenecks impose on American competitiveness. The House version passed with a provision (80303) exempting from green card caps those with advanced STEM degrees, the tech talent that America needs to compete with China. We urge the committee to retain this provision or some appropriately modified version in the final bill, so as to help address the national security and global competition issues addressed in this letter. As the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence put it, such targeted STEM talent reforms are “a national security imperative.”
Targeted STEM talent reforms carry deep bipartisan support. The House G.O.P. China Task Force Report noted the U.S. “needs to continue to attract the best and brightest STEM talent from around the world, or risk falling behind in the global race for talent and losing its competitive advantage in innovation.” The Biden administration has argued “one of America’s greatest strengths is our ability to attract global talent to strengthen our economy and technological competitiveness.” The Future of Defense Task Force, a recent bipartisan initiative of the House Armed Services Committee, identified STEM immigrants’ contributions to U.S. leade

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