Exceptional contributions to US science by the foreign-born and foreign-educated

This paper contributes to the debate on high-skilled migration by examining whether the foreign-born and foreign-educated are disproportionately repre sented among individuals making exceptional contributions to science and en gineering (S&E) in the U.S. Six indicators of scientific achievement are us ed: individuals elected to the National Academy of Sciences and/or National Academy of Engineering, authors of citation classics, authors of hot paper s, the 250 most-cited authors, authors of highly cited patents, and scienti sts who have played a key role in launching biotechnology firms. We do not claim that this list is exhaustive, merely illustrative, Using a variety of sources, we are able to determine the birth and educatio nal origin of 89.3% of the study group of over 4,500 scientists and enginee rs. For each indicator of scientific achievement, we test to see if the obs erved frequency by birth (or educational) origin is significantly different from the frequency one would expect given the composition of the scientifi c labor force in the U.S. We find that although there is some variation by discipline, individuals making exceptional contributions to S&E in the U.S. are disproportionately drawn from the foreign born. Only in the instance o f hot papers in the life sciences were we unable to reject the null hypothe sis that the proportion is the same as that in the underlying population. T he most frequent country of origin in the life sciences is Great Britain fo llowed by Germany. In the physical sciences the reverse is true. We also fi nd that individuals making exceptional contributions are, in many instances , disproportionately foreign educated, both at the undergraduate and at the graduate level. We conclude that immigrants have been a source of strength and vitality for U.S. science and, on balance, the U.S. appears to have benefited from the educational investments made by other countries. We do not investigate, how ever, whether U.S. scientists and engineers have borne part of the cost of the inflow of foreign talent by being displaced from jobs and/or earning lo wer wages. Nor do we investigate the cost to the countries of origin.