Immigrants made, make and will make America great

It is fitting to talk about the contribution of immigrants in the U.S. , given the anti-immigrant political climate across the Atlantic Ocean.  It is my understanding that anti-immigrant fervor was a major component of Brexit vote.

On September 30, after reading Jan Vilcek’s memoir (Love and Science), I sent my daughters an email extolling the contribution of immigrants in the U.S.  It is a familiar story of Jewish scientists escaping (or hiding from Nazi as a child in his case) not only from Nazi, but also from communist Czechoslovakia.

I always have difficulty saying or spelling Czechoslovakia, but I am not alone; as Churchill once said, “To English ears the name of Czechoslovakia sounds outlandish”.

Jan Vilcek (an M.D. PhD.) made a fortune by receiving the royalty from Remicade (the first tumor necrosis factor inhibitor approved by FDA).  He has a chapter talking about the contributions (esp. in bio-medicine) from the immigrants like himself.  Vilcek Foundation has Vilcek Prizes for the immigrants who have great contribution in science and art—his wife is an art historian, spending her career at NYC Metropolitan Museum.  Vilcek added a new prize for the children of immigrants a few years ago.

Someone should tell Trump that it was immigrants that made America great in the first place and it is still happening.  “Nobels Pouring Across the Border” is one of the editorials today (10/11/16) in the Wall Street Journal.  It just happened that all six U.S. Nobel Prize winners this year are all immigrants.

Economics prize winners:

-          Oliver Hart (from the United Kingdom)

-          Bengt Holmstrom (from Finland)

Physics prize winner are all from Britain

-          David Thouless

-          Michael Kosterlitz

-          Duncan Haldane

Chemistry prize winner:

-          Sir J. Fraser Stoddart (from the United Kingdom—Edinburgh, Scotland)

Being an immigrant myself, I hate to say U.S. is what it is today largely because of her enormous capacity of accepting and absorbing immigrants.

Foreign-born scientists winning Nobel Prizes for the U.S. is not an isolated event this year; from 1901 to 2015, 31% of U.S. Nobel laureates were not born in the U.S.  In cases of Nobel Prize in Medicine between 1901 and 2014, thirty-three of the ninety-eight laureates were foreign-born.  The recent trend is even more astonishing. “The immigrants have won 40%, or 31 of the 78 Nobels won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics since 2000.  The winners came from many countries including Japan, Canada, Turkey, Austria, China, [Taiwan]. Israel, South Africa and Germany” as the WSJ editorial reported.

Similar statistic was also observed in the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator awards and MacArthur Foundation “genius awards”.

If the children of immigrants were included the percentage would be much higher.  Richard Feynman’s parents were born in Minsk, Belarus (used to be part of Soviet Union).  Arthurs Kornberg’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from Austrian Galicia (now part of Poland). President Obama’s father was also an immigrant. Seventy percent of the forty finalists of the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search had foreign-born parents.