The Olympic Games have always been about more than sports, with the medal count serving as a measure of national vitality. This year’s Winter Games in Milan and Cortina are no different. The Americans, like everyone else, want confirmation of their pre-eminence. So important is that outcome that even US Vice President J.D. Vance briefly acknowledged the value of non-white immigration to the US, when he complained that Eileen Gu (谷愛凌), the US-born medal-winning skier for China, should be competing under the US flag.
However, the medal table is just one scoreboard. Beyond the ice rink and the slopes is a much larger and more consequential contest for excellence, namely in scientific leadership, technological supremacy and geopolitical influence. Here, too, China is most portrayed as the US’ nemesis, with the future of each at stake. Here, too, there is a question about what role immigrants — like Gu’s Chinese mother — should play.
Although immigrants bring talent and ambition, they also might compete for jobs or disseminate US-acquired knowledge abroad. Owing to these concerns, the US has tightened its immigration policies in the past few years, even restricting highly skilled professionals.
Such measures reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of how countries compete for global pre-eminence — and the Olympics reveal why. Consider figure skating, one of the most visible winter sports. For decades, the US has crowded the podium with the children of immigrants: Michelle Kwan (關穎珊, silver, 1998; bronze, 2002), Sasha Cohen (silver, 2006), Mirai Nagasu (bronze, 2018, team), Nathan Chen (陳巍, gold, 2022), and, this year, Ilia Malinin (gold, team) and Alysa Liu (劉美賢, gold).
The same is true in other sports. For example, the speed skater Apolo Ohno (gold, 2002, 2006; eight medals total) has a Japanese-born father, and snowboarder Chloe Kim (gold, 2018; gold, 2022; silver, 2026) is the daughter of South Korean immigrants.
The list grows longer still if one includes champions descended from earlier waves of migration, such as Polish-American Tara Lipinski (gold, 1998) and Japanese-American Kristi Yamaguchi (gold, 1992). Time and again, the US’ strength on ice and snow has been built by families whose journeys began elsewhere.
The analogy to science is hard to miss. About 1.2 million international students study in the US each year — accounting for about 6 percent of total higher-education enrollment — and they are concentrated in STEM and quantitative fields.
For example, foreign nationals account for 82 percent of full-time graduate students in petroleum engineering, 74 percent in electrical engineering, 72 percent in computer and information sciences, 71 percent in industrial and manufacturing engineering, 70 percent in statistics, 67 percent in economics, 61 percent in civil engineering, 58 percent in mechanical engineering and agricultural economics, 56 percent in mathematics, 54 percent in chemical engineering, 53 percent in metallurgical and materials engineering, 52 percent in materials sciences, and 50 percent in pharmaceutical sciences.
Immigrants and their children also make up a disproportionate share of the US’ engineers, company founders and patent holders. Some see this as a source of US strength, whereas critics warn of leakage. In reality, talent flows both ways.
For example, among Olympians, the figure skater Deanna Stellato-Dudek was born and trained in the US, but now competes for Canada. More controversially, China reportedly allocated substantial state funding to recruit US-trained athletes such as Gu (who has won five Olympic medals for her sponsor) and Zhu Yi (朱易) before the 2022 Beijing Games.
It is not surprising that such moves fuel anxiety in the US, but a sense of perspective is in order. The US won 25 medals at the Beijing Olympics in 2022, compared with China’s 15, and the gap was even wider this year, with the US winning 33 medals and China again taking home 15. Evidently, the benefits of attracting foreign talent outweigh the costs.
The same lesson holds in science, where the US has been the world’s leading source of Nobel laureates. US institutions have captured about 40 percent of science Nobels since 1945, and more than half of economics Nobels since 1969. The US’ prize-winning edge has been deeply intertwined with immigration. About 40 percent of US-affiliated Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine have been foreign-born.
Many of the private-sector architects of the US’ most important strategic technologies were also born abroad. Sergey Brin, born in the Soviet Union, cofounded Google. Elon Musk, born in South Africa, built Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), born in Taiwan, cofounded Nvidia. Eric Yuan (袁征), born in China, founded Zoom.
This is not new. Immigrants have fueled the US’ rise on the global stage since before World War II. Albert Einstein fled to the US in the 1930s. John von Neumann, born in Hungary, designed the architecture that underlies modern computing. Wernher von Braun, born in Germany and once an engineer for the Nazis, later became the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that carried Americans to the moon.
The US has repeatedly turned foreign-born talent — even from rival powers — into engines of national strength.
To see why isolation is harmful, ask a simple question: What if the US had closed its doors to these brilliant minds? Would they have stopped thinking, inventing and striving? Of course not, just as Ohno and Kwan would not have stopped skating. If the US turns talent away, talent would not vanish; it would relocate, and another country would claim the medals and the breakthroughs.
In the past year, the number of international graduate students studying in the US declined by 12 percent. If the trend continues, it would undermine the US’ scientific competitiveness. International rivalry — whether on the ice rink or in the laboratory — is a competition for talent and it cannot be achieved by hiding from the world. It requires creating the most compelling environment for talent to gather, develop and remain.
If the US wants to win the race for science, it must pair the best from abroad with the best at home, and offer not just opportunity but also a country where the best want to be.
Nancy Qian, professor of economics at Northwestern University, is codirector of the university’s Global Poverty Research Lab, founding director of the China Econ Lab and a visiting professor at the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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