Immigrants ‘Crucial to Innovation’
Date: June 27, 2012
Today Online
June 27, 2012
Arguing against immigration policies that force foreign-born innovators to leave the United States, a new study released yesterday shows that immigrants played a role in more than three out of four patents at the nation’s top research universities.
Conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a non-profit group co-founded by New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the study notes that nearly all the patents were in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM fields that are a crucial driver of job growth. Patents, the study maintains, are a gauge for a nation’s level of innovation.
The report points out that while many of the world’s top foreign-born innovators are trained at US universities, after graduation they face “daunting or insurmountable immigration hurdles that force them to leave and bring their talents elsewhere”.