The founders of the greatest American companies (at least as measured by their stock-market caps) are Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook), the late Steve Jobs of Apple, Sergey Brin of Alphabet (Google) and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
All seven share one of two things in common: Six went to top U.S. universities (Harvard for Gates and Zuckerberg; Stanford for Huang and Brin; Princeton for Bezos; and Pennsylvania for Musk) and five either themselves are immigrants (Musk, Huang, and Brin) or they are first-generation immigrants (Jobs’s father was a Syrian immigrant and Bezos’s adoptive father was a Cuban immigrant).
This is nothing new. America always has relied upon its immigrants and its universities to lead the way for American supremacy. This was especially true during WWII when the U.S. developed the atomic bomb thanks to a team of scientists (most of whom were foreign-born and working at the University of Chicago) that was led by physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer would have made the above list for two reasons: He was both Harvard-educated and the son of a German immigrant.
According to the Nobel Prize website, since 1901, there have been 148 prize recipients who were foreign-born individuals who either had immigrated permanently to the United States or were at a U.S. institution of higher learning at the time they received the award. These 148 individuals account for 16 percent of all Nobel Laureates.
Yet it is precisely these two great pillars of America’s historic economic and technological strength — our world-renowned universities and our immigrants — that are on the verge of being destroyed. By attacking the former, we are discouraging the latter from coming to America.
The smartest and hardest-working individuals from across the globe — who always have viewed America as the foremost country in the world where they could develop their ideas at the world’s greatest scientific research institutions — are either leaving or not coming because the welcome mat has been pulled from our doorstep.
Nations in Europe and Asia, whose leaders are mystified by our sudden ignorance and xenophobia, are rushing to fill the vacuum by offering grants and opportunities to world-class scientists that previously had been monopolized by the United States.
We are entering the equivalent of the Dark Ages — and for the first time ever in our history, the United States is now facing the prospect of a brain drain, as opposed to being the beneficiary of a brain gain.
