Abstract
This paper studies the impact of U.S. immigration barriers on global knowledge production. We present four key findings. First, among Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists, migrants to the U.S. play a central role in the global knowledge network—representing 20-33% of the frontier knowledge producers. Second, using novel survey data and hand-curated life-histories of International Math Olympiad (IMO) medalists, we show that migrants to the U.S. are up to six times more productive than migrants to other countries—even after accounting for talent during one’s teenage years. Third, financing costs are a key factor preventing foreign talent from migrating abroad to pursue their dream careers, particularly for talent from developing countries. Fourth, certain ‘push’ incentives that reduce immigration barriers—by addressing financing constraints for top foreign talent—could increase the global scientific output of future cohorts by 42 percent. We concludeby discussing policy options for the U.S. and the global scientific community.
Highlights
While talent can be born anywhere, few places specialize in nurturing it
Our findings suggest that certain ‘push’ incentives that reduce immigration barriers to the U.S.—by addressing financing constraints for top foreign talent—could increase the global scientific output of future cohorts of talent by 42% percent
Migrants to the U.S account for one in five worldwide Nobel Prize Winners in science. These findings are consistent with prior work that has shown that much of the world’s top talent migrates to the U.S (Weinberg 2011, Hunter, Oswald & Charlton 2009, Kerr 2018) but only some eventually return to their countries of origin (Gaule 2014)
Summary
While talent can be born anywhere, few places specialize in nurturing it. talented individuals have pursued opportunities abroad for centuries. Our contribution is to quantify how U.S immigration barriers could impact the advancement of science using hand-curated datasets of talented individuals – Nobel laureates, Fields medalists, and participants of the International Math Olympiads (IMO), a prominent worldwide math competition for talented high school students. Our dataset includes career histories of migration and lifetime scientific output of 2,200 IMO medalists from over one hundred countries We combine these data with newly collected unique survey data of 610 recent IMO participants, which includes information on which universities they applied to, were admitted to and attended. We classify the Nobel laureates and Fields Medalists as migrants if their country of birth is different from the country of their main academic affiliation at the time of the award. We asked a series of counterfactual choice questions where respondents were asked to choose between counterfactual admission offers to institutions of different ranking and usually in the same country, with one being funded and the other not
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