At the New York Times, Bret Stephens offers a passionate defense of illegal aliens making America great in his New York Times column. It relies on the usual "immigrants found companies"narrative that leaves a little bit out.
As for Nobelists, a report by George Mason’s Institute for Immigration Research found that Americans have won 40 percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded — and immigrants accounted for 35 percent of those winners. Last year, the only native-born American to win the prize was Bob Dylan, for literature. The rest of the American winners — economist Oliver Hart, physicist J. Michael Kosterlitz, chemist Fraser Stoddart — are immigrants.
All three of them, Kosterlitz, Hart and Stoddart, are Brits. Two, Kosterlitz and Stoddart, are from Scotland. Kosterlitz was born to Jewish immigrant parents.
So Stephens certainly makes a compelling argument for Scottish immigration to America. I'm all for revamping the immigration system to favor Brits at the expense of Hondurans. If Stephens really wants us to win more Nobel prizes, he'll go along.
But Stephens isn't arguing for more Scots. But for legalizing the illegal alien "DREAMERS" most of whom are from are the products of illegal alien laborers from failed states, some of whom have committed brutal crimes after Obama's illegal amnesty.
A common American conceit is that we attract brilliant foreigners because we have brilliant things: great universities, vast financial resources, a dynamic economy, high-tech. That gets things mostly backward. It’s because we have brilliant foreigners that we have those things in the first place. Google. Comcast. eBay. Kraft. Pfizer. AT&T. They all had immigrants as founders.
Google was co-founded by Sergey Brin, a Russian Jewish immigrant. Comcast was co-founded by Ralph Roberts, a Russian Jewish immigrant. eBay by Pierre Omidyar, a French-Persian immigrant. Kraft by James Kraft, a Canadian immigrant. Pfizer by Charles Pfizer, a German immigrant. By AT&T, I presume Stephens means the Scottish inventor, Alexander Graham Bell.
The common denominator here is that these immigrants are almost all Europeans. The recent immigrants that Stephens trots out are Russian Jews.
Again, this is a very compelling argument for Scottish, Canadian, German and Jewish immigration. It's a terrible argument for the immigration system that we do have which prioritizes cheap labor from failed states.
Restrictionists also argue that we need to favor newcomers with “skills” and educational credentials. More rubbish. Jan Koum arrived in the U.S. from Ukraine in 1992 as a 16-year-old boy with his mother, living off food stamps. She worked as a babysitter. He later dropped out of college. In 2009 he came up with an idea for a mobile messaging app. Five years later Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $22 billion.
Jan Koum is a Russian Jewish immigrant. His father ran a construction company back in the Ukraine. He apparently supervised the construction of hospitals and schools. I'm going to speculate that he had a degree. His mother probably did too.
If Bret Stephens really wants to make the case for illegal aliens from El Salvador making America great, he's welcome to do so. All he has to do is find a bunch of major tech companies start by illegal aliens from El Salvador.
How hard can it be?
All he's doing right now is making a case for revamping our immigration system to favor merit based immigration. Not to mention Scottish and Russian Jewish immigrants.