In my more than 20 years of practicing immigration law, I have never ceased to be struck by the magnitude of scientific achievements by foreign nationals here in the U.S. So, I shouldn’t be surprised that—this year especially—immigrants dominated over native-born U.S. scientists in the recent Nobel Prize announcements. Four of the five U.S. scientist Nobel laureates in 2013 are foreign born: Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, Thomas C. Südhof and Arieh Warshel. Three bring accolades to institutions here in California: Levitt and Südhof are affiliated with Stanford; Warshel with USC.

Actually, this year really isn’t much of an anomaly when it comes to Nobel prizes and immigrants. Looking back at the Nobel Foundation’s data starting in 1901, when Nobel prizes first were awarded, 26 percent of all U.S. Nobel recipients have been immigrants. In the sciences, nearly 35 percent of U.S. Nobel recipients in Medicine, Chemistry and Physics have been immigrants. The immunologist and biomedical entrepreneur Jan Vilcek connected the historical dots behind this Nobel prize phenomenon in his 2005 article published in the FASEB Journal, “A Prize for the Foreign Born — How Golden Would American Science Be without our Foreign Born Scientists?” Vilcek outlined the shift from Europe to the U.S. for scientific training starting with WWII, when many prominent Jewish scientists and others left Europe, eventually landing in the U.S. Then, in the 1960s and ’70s, with the U.S. response to the successes of the Soviet space program, scientists continued to flock to the U.S., and the shift to the U.S. as the top destination for scientific training was complete.

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