Washington post on Immigrants and Nobel Prize

Immigrants and Laureates
America's two other winners of Nobel prizes show how important it is that the U.S.get immigration policy right.

By Carl Schramm and Robert Litan (Emphasis added)
Friday, October 12, 2007; 5:05 PM

Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize is getting almost all the attention, but America's two other new Nobel laureates also have interesting stories. Geneticists Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work in gene targeting. And while their honor highlights the quality of American research, it also shows how our scientific community is enriched by highly skilled immigrants.

Capecchi, who endured a heart-wrenching early childhood in wartime Italy, immigrated with his mother to the United States after World War II, who survived the Dachau concentration camp. Today, he leads research teams at the University of Utah. Smithies, a native of Britain, came to the United States in the 1950s to work at the University of Wisconsin and has spent the last 19 years at the University of North Carolina. Both are now U.S. citizens.

Foreign-born researchers are common in the U.S. academic and scientific communities. In fact, more than a third of American Nobel laureates in the sciences over the last 15 years were born outside the U.S. These scientists are conducting research with extraordinary promise for improving lives, as well as great potential to produce commercialized therapies and technologies that drive U.S. innovation and economic growth.

The U.S. should welcome these highly skilled researchers and innovators. Unfortunately, recent trends in immigration policy are making it more difficult for foreign-born scientists and engineers to put their skills to work in this country -- and that could have profoundly negative implications for the U.S. economy.

...

But the difficulties are getting worse. The U.S. has responded to an increased demand for entry -- driven by the fact that it is a global leader in science, technology and innovation -- by capping the number of visas available to immigrants from any one country. As a result, the wait time for visa processing for countries with the largest populations, such as India and China, is close to six years. Anecdotal evidence suggests that increasing numbers of skilled workers from India and China have begun to return home, where the economies are booming.

Furthermore, tightened immigration screening in the U.S. following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 has lengthened processing delays. Of course, national security must always be our top priority. But policymakers must come to grips with the potential damage to the U.S. economy and scientific community if many of the world's brightest people decide it is too difficult to work in the United States and take their skills elsewhere.

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Carl Schramm is president and chief executive and Robert Litan is vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation.

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Comment: Assuming the major purpose of the immigration policy restrictions is to improve "security", I have to wonder whether that is (a) the secure future of the nation as a player on the global stage, or (b) the security of North American Prejudice and Stereotypes.

I recall news a few years ago about limitations on foreigners to a conference in the US on the subject of cryptography. The administration claimed to be concerned that "secrets would leak out" to foreigners. The conference organizers replied that the people who had the innovative techniques were the foreigners, and the point of the conference was to bring those "secrets" into our hands.

It seems that building walls to block the flow of innovation does work -- just not in the intended direction! The desire to be "more competitive" has the impact of making us "less competitive."

The challenge is to make the evidence of the actual outcome of policies so vivid that it can overcome the old mental stereotype in which "this should have worked!"

Certainly the teaching of Public Health when dealing with "complex systems' is that any policy should come with a built-in process that:

• is prepared to see surprising, contrary, and paradoxical results
• measures and evaluates the actual result
• undoes the policy if it is not working, or possibly
• reverses the policy if the outcomes were the exact opposite of what was desired.

The crucial thing in dealing with complex systems is to let mental models adjust to reality, not try to make reality fit the mental model. Some learning and some un-learning may be required.

Un-learning is particularly difficult for some people. They can learn something fine one way, but then they can't adapt when the situation changes and a new way is required. This is actually a clinical mental problem called "perseveration" and is often measured by psychologists with something called the Wisconsin Card Sorting test.

I think some wag defined "obsession" as the tendency, when something is producing the wrong results, to do even more of it hoping that will work. This can be a form of denial when a cherished belief or stereotype is challenged or threatened with being overturned.

I recall the "Sven and Ollie" joke Garrison Keillor told on Prairie Home Companion. Sven walks in and Ollie's ears are both bandaged.
"What happened?!" he asks.
"Oh", says Ollie, "I was ironing when the phone rang and I put the iron up to my ear instead of the phone."
"I see. But what happened to your other ear?"
" Ahh. After I got burned, I tried to call 911."

It is true that there are other competing and valid concerns with immigration policy. Flooding the country with new people of any type, in the absence of a system for accommodating them can be a disaster.

Still, simple statistics tell us that with more people, the top of the bell curve should be higher. China, with 1.6 billion people, will tend to have a top 10% that is higher than the top 10% in the US, with 300 million people.

Again, the question shouldn't be whether to add more people, but why we have, so far, been unable to learn how to use people intelligently so that more people is better.

I fear sometimes that, with "two economies" (one corporate and one human being), that humans are viewed as dead weight, not as contributing assets. It's amazing to me every time a company, under pressure to perform, makes stockholders happy by firing a fifth of its staff. If all those people were present and not contributing, shouldn't the CEO get sacked?

This gets back to "obsession" and the wry comment that "The whippings will continue until morale improves!"

• Fragmented humans tend to add up to dead weight, where more is worse.
• Unified humans tend to add up to greater power, where more is better.
• The problem is not with the number of people - it's in lacking "unity in diversity".

We should be able to add people to a group, and get more output. (blue line, above, labeled "Hope". What we tend to actually get is the red line, labeled "actual", which is where dread "committees" are born.

There is a way to get astounding good results out of people, where more is better. Use the search box above to look up "positive deviance".


That's our problem. Figure out how to make "unity in diversity" work, and this will fix most of the other problems, or provide you the mechanism with the brainpower to figure out how to fix them.

(Also see my other post - "Houston, we have another problem". )

W.