In almost every field of human endeavor, talent attracts talent, and talent is mobile. The best want to work with, compete against, and learn from the best. This creates a virtuous cycle where excellence begets more excellence, and the destinations that welcome the world’s most gifted become magnets for even greater achievement. Countries that understand this truth prosper. Those that forget it decline.
Consider professional basketball. The NBA’s current top 5 players are foreign-born: Nikola Jokić from Serbia (a three-time MVP), Giannis Antetokounmpo from Greece (a two-time MVP), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander from Canada, Victor Wembanyama from France, and Luka Dončić from Slovenia. This isn’t a crisis for American basketball, it’s a triumph. The NBA’s openness to global talent has made it the world’s premier basketball league, attracting more talent, investment, viewership, and innovation. American players benefit from competing against the world’s best. Fans witness the highest level of play. The entire ecosystem flourishes.
Now observe what happens when countries reject this principle. Britain’s decision to abolish its non-domicile tax regime in 2024 triggered a historic exodus, one millionaire every 45 minutes, 10,800 wealthy individuals in total, representing a 157% increase from 2023. These departures aren’t statistical abstractions. When wealthy individuals leave, they take their entrepreneurial ventures, investments, philanthropy, professional networks, and the jobs their activities create. The Centre for Economics and Business Research warned that if even a quarter of Britain’s estimated 74,000 non-doms were to leave, the economic cost would outweigh any anticipated tax windfall.
Meanwhile, other nations are actively recruiting the globally mobile. Italy has a €100,000 flat levy on foreign income, Greece has a €100,000 annual tax for those investing at least €500,000 in the country, Dubai and Abu Dhabi have implemented low-tax regimes to attract financial firms.
The lesson is universal: in a world where talent can choose its destination, countries must compete for the best. America once understood this better than anyone. The question now is whether it still does.
America’s competitive edge: Built by immigrants
The story of American technological and scientific dominance is fundamentally a story of welcoming global talent. From brilliant minds fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s to Indian and Chinese engineers who built Silicon Valley, immigrants have been the engine of American innovation for nearly a century. Yet as 2025 unfolds, this competitive advantage faces an existential threat due to restrictive immigration policies targeting global talent.
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Meanwhile, our main competition, China, is gaining ground. China now produces nearly twice as much total scientific research output as the U.S. and holds a 17 percent advantage in elite publications. This dramatic reversal represents not just a statistical shift but a potential reordering of global power, one that our immigration policy may have inadvertently accelerated.
American scientific supremacy
The roots of American scientific supremacy lie in understanding the universal law when others forgot it. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, some 2,600 scientists and scholars left Germany within the first year alone, the vast majority Jewish. Twenty-five percent of all physicists were lost from German universities in an insane squandering of talent. This exodus proved to be “Hitler’s gift” to the Allies, and America’s gain because we welcomed them.
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The impact was immediate and profound. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, James Franck, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, and Klaus Fuchs weren’t merely competent researchers, they were the intellectual elite of their generation. Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, co-authored with Szilard, catalyzed the Manhattan Project. Of the 86 members in the theoretical division of the Los Alamos lab, 18 were Jewish, almost 21 percent. Of the eight groups in 1945, five were led by Jewish scientists, including Richard Feynman, Hans Bethe, and John von Neumann.
The Manhattan Project established more than military superiority; it created a template for American scientific leadership that would persist for decades. The large number of refugees and immigrants gave the American nuclear program an international character unusual in such a top-secret program, and unique among the nuclear programs that followed in other countries.
Beyond immediate wartime contributions, these émigré scientists transformed American academia itself. Research by Petra Moser and colleagues found that patenting in the United States rose 31 percent after 1933 in the fields émigré chemists were working in, staying elevated into the 1950s. More significantly, the émigrés’ effect on U.S. patenting was driven primarily by their ability to attract a new group of domestic inventors to their fields. They didn’t just contribute their own work; they catalyzed entire generations of American innovation. Talent attracted talent.
Silicon Valley: The second wave
The pattern repeated itself under different circumstances in the late 20th century. As American immigration laws liberalized following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a new wave arrived, primarily graduate students from India and China pursuing advanced degrees at American universities. Many stayed, transforming the technology industry and proving once again that welcoming global talent creates competitive advantage.
The statistics are staggering. Of tech workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher in Silicon Valley, 23% came from India and 18% from China. By the late 1990s, Chinese and Indian engineers were senior executives at one-quarter of Silicon Valley’s new technology businesses. These immigrant-run companies collectively accounted for more than $16.8 billion in sales and 58,282 jobs in 1998.
Indian immigrants pioneered new models of entrepreneurial success. Organizations like The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), founded in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s, created networks for mentoring and angel investing. Of all engineering and tech start-ups formed in America by immigrants between 2006 and 2012, 33.2% were created by individuals of Indian origin, exceeding the total from China, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Israel, Russia, and South Korea combined.
The Chinese contribution followed a somewhat different pattern, with stronger ties back to Taiwan and mainland China. A transnational community of Chinese, primarily Taiwanese, engineers fostered two-way flows of capital, skill, and information between California and the Hsinchu-Taipei region of Taiwan, creating an ecosystem where innovation flowed bidirectionally.
The broader impact: Immigrants as national assets
The influence extends far beyond technology. As of 2025, 46.2 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. In fiscal year 2024, these companies generated $8.6 trillion in revenue and employed over 15.4 million people worldwide, the highest level recorded since tracking began in 2011.
The list reads like a who’s who of American business: Apple (co-founded by Steve Jobs, son of a Syrian immigrant), Google (co-founded by Russian immigrant Sergey Brin), NVIDIA (founded by Taiwanese immigrant Jensen Huang), Amazon (founded by Jeff Bezos, whose stepfather was a Cuban immigrant). Immigrants and their children founded 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies in professional services, 65.6 percent in manufacturing, and 57.5 percent in information.
In academia, the pattern continues. Between 1901 and 2023, immigrants were awarded 36% of Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics. Since 2000, that percentage has risen to 40%. Of the 63 laureates who won after moving from their birth countries, 41 lived in the United States when their Nobel was awarded.
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America’s competitive advantage wasn’t accidental. It came from understanding the universal law: talent attracts talent, and creating an environment where the world’s best want to come attracts even more of the world’s best.
Competition: China’s strategic response
Yet even as America’s immigrant-driven innovation machine continues producing results, a fundamental shift is underway — one that suggests America may be forgetting the very principle that made it dominant. China’s rise in scientific output demonstrates what happens when a nation commits to competing for talent while its rival grows complacent.
As recently as 2020, the United States led China by 53 percent in Nature Index publications (29,172 to 19,097). But China’s growth rate of 18 percent per year vastly outpaced America’s 2.3 percent annual growth. By 2023, the gap narrowed to just 7 percent. In 2024, China pulled decisively ahead. China grew its Nature Index output by 95 percent from 2020 to 2024, while America’s rose just 9.5 percent. That’s not competition, it’s a rout.
This isn’t merely about quantity. Using fractional counting to divide credit among authors from multiple countries, China accounted for 27.2% of the most cited papers published in 2018-2020, compared to America’s 24.9%. The quality gap, once a reliable talking point for dismissing Chinese research, has closed.
The patent landscape reinforces this trajectory. A total of 1.8 million patent applications were filed in China in 2024, accounting for nearly half the global total and more than three times the number submitted to the United States. While critics rightly note that many Chinese patents reflect government incentives rather than genuine innovation, in specific high-value domains China’s lead is real. In artificial intelligence patents, China’s AI patent filings climbed from 59,054 in 2019 to 188,757 in 2024, more than doubling in volume, while U.S. filings held steady between 31,000 and 35,000 annually. For generative AI specifically, China-based inventors filed 38,210 inventions between 2014-2023, six times more than America’s 6,276.
By 2024, China became the world’s largest producer, accounting for 27 percent of global scientific articles. China’s research and development expenditure reached 2.68 percent of GDP compared with approximately 3.45 percent in the United States. Given China’s larger GDP in purchasing power parity terms, the absolute scale of Chinese R&D spending now rivals or exceeds that of the United States in certain sectors.
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Self-inflicted wounds
The United States’ response to China’s rise has been characterized by restriction rather than competition, forgetting that talent is mobile and will flow to where it’s most welcome. According to the National Science Foundation’s 2024 Science and Engineering Indicators, by 2017, more than 20 percent of all U.S. internationally co-authored papers included at least one Chinese collaborator. Yet the trajectory of exponential growth reached an inflection point around 2017-18, coinciding with increased scrutiny of scientific collaboration with China.
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the universal law. The Manhattan Project succeeded not by excluding foreign talent but by embracing it. Silicon Valley thrived by creating networks connecting the world’s best minds. Rather than competing to attract and retain talent, America has made immigration more difficult precisely when global competition for talent intensifies.
The difficulty of obtaining H-1B visas, uncertainty around pathways to permanent residence, and increasing political hostility toward “legal immigration” all redirect talent elsewhere. When Indian and Chinese researchers can increasingly pursue world-class research in their home countries, with less visa uncertainty, cultural barriers, and discrimination, the calculus changes. In 2000, more than 35 percent of Chinese publications were internationally co-authored. By 2023, that figure dropped below 18 percent, even as total output soared. China is becoming less dependent on international collaboration precisely as it masters the research enterprise, and America is helping drive this shift by making itself a less attractive destination.
Meanwhile, other nations remember what America seems to be forgetting. Just as Italy, Greece, and Dubai compete for wealthy individuals with favorable tax regimes, countries worldwide compete for researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators with streamlined visa processes, research funding, and pathways to permanent residence.
Last word: Compete or decline
History offers a clear lesson: America’s scientific and technological leadership never came from isolation or ethnic homogeneity. It came from being the destination where the world’s most ambitious and talented people wanted to work.
The uncomfortable truth is that incremental increases in domestic R&D spending, while restricting international collaboration and making immigration more difficult, will not maintain America’s edge. This strategy has never worked in American history, and it won’t work now, especially when competitors actively court the talent America turns away.
The United States faces a choice that Britain is now facing with its non-domicile regime, that Germany faced when Hitler drove out Jewish scientists, that every nation faces when deciding whether to compete for talent or retreat into restriction. It can continue down a path of nationalism, hoping domestic talent alone can maintain its edge. Or it can recommit to the principles that built its dominance: investing ambitiously in research infrastructure, creating clear pathways for talented immigrants to contribute and stay, maintaining openness to international collaboration, and fostering the entrepreneurial ecosystem that repeatedly transformed immigrant students into American success stories.
The window for this choice is closing. Today’s graduate students in Beijing and Bangalore increasingly see staying home as the better option. Once that perception becomes entrenched, reversing it will be extraordinarily difficult. The NBA thrives because it competes for the world’s best basketball players. Britain’s economy suffers because it stopped competing for global capital. America’s century of scientific dominance was built by understanding that talent attracts talent and talent is mobile. If it wishes to extend that dominance into the next century, it must remember that lesson, and act on it, before it’s too late.