The United States has long prided itself as a nation that has been built by immigrants. However, until recently, a precise gauge of the immigrants’ contribution to the country’s economic and technological progress has remained elusive. As President Donald Trump moved to restrict employment visas for skilled foreigners, research from Stanford sought to address this unresolved question.
To shed light on the matter, the researchers analyzed the output of almost 880,000 Americans who patented inventions between 1990 and 2016. Their study revealed that immigrants have made a disproportionate contribution to innovation in the U.S. Although they constituted only 16% of inventors, immigrants accounted for 23% of the patents issued over the years under examination.
The researchers’ findings were not merely quantitative. The share of patents produced by immigrants was slightly higher when adjusted by the number of citations that each patent received over the ensuing three years, a vital indicator of their quality and usefulness. Furthermore, during the period examined, immigrants were responsible for a quarter of the total economic value of patents granted, as determined by the stock market’s response to new patents.
“The high-skilled immigrants we have in the U.S. are incredibly productive and innovative, and they’re disproportionately contributing to innovation in our society,” the researchers explain.
Innovative immigrants
Prior research has suggested that immigrants make a significant contribution to American innovation. These studies have revealed that immigrants constitute nearly a quarter of the US workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and over a quarter of the nation’s Nobel Prize winners.
Nonetheless, the new analysis, which examines the role of foreign-born innovators living in the US, is the first of its kind to utilize patents as a direct measure of output by such innovators. The results are largely the same, however, with the average immigrant having a significantly higher innovative output than the average American inventor.
In a groundbreaking study, researchers began with a vast database of 300 million US adults who had lived in the country between 1990 and 2016. They used Social Security numbers to identify individuals who had immigrated after age 19, as US-born citizens typically receive their Social Security numbers at birth or in childhood. By matching names and address history, the researchers were able to identify individuals in the database who were also listed as inventors with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, with proportional credit given to each author in the case of multiple-author patents.
Diverse impact
The study’s findings were notable, indicating that immigrants generate patents across diverse sectors such as electronics, computers, medicine, and chemicals. Additionally, the researchers found that, although all inventors reach their productivity peak in their late 30s and early 40s, immigrants experience a slower decline from this peak than their US-born counterparts for the remainder of their careers. The reasons for this discrepancy remain unknown.
The researchers believe that there are probably a number of possible reasons, with a primary factor being the brain drain that sees the best and brightest people secure visas in the United States. This is not the only factor, however, with the researchers also suggesting that cross-border collaboration is also important.
Foreign-born inventors exhibit a greater propensity for collaborating with inventors located in foreign territories and referencing foreign technologies in their patent applications.
“Different pools of knowledge get imported by immigration, and diversity in background is good for innovation,” the researchers explain.
Innovation hotspots
The investigation also unearthed proof that immigrant innovators are more likely to reside in hubs of innovation, such as Silicon Valley or Boston, and to engage in patent work pertaining to advanced technology sectors. Despite this, the study concludes that these two elements only account for a 30% disparity in patent output.
Furthermore, immigrant inventors bring about contributions that extend beyond their own achievements, as the researchers discovered. The researchers identified inventors who passed away prior to reaching the age of 60 and evaluated the output of individuals who had collaborated with the deceased inventor on a patent before their untimely demise.
In contrast to a group of inventors that did not lose a co-author, surviving inventors produced 10% fewer patents following the death of their collaborator. The impact was greater for inventors whose deceased co-author was an immigrant, as their productivity dropped by 17%. This gap persisted even after the researchers took several factors into account, including the productivity of the deceased inventor.
Of course, the innovative potential of immigrants has been well documented, not least in articles by myself, and yet still governments around the world succumb to anti-immigration tendencies. Unfortunately, it seems to be an issue in which evidence often cedes power to emotion and rhetoric. As long as it continues to do so then nations will continue to fail to tap into the innovative power immigrants can offer.
