‘Pretty Amazing’: Immigration Expert On Bounty Of Nobel-Winning U.S. Immigrants

New analysis published this week by the National Foundation for American Policy found that, since 2000, immigrants have accounted for a whopping 38 percent of American-won Nobel prizes in chemistry, medicine and physics.

“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” quipped National Immigration Forum CEO Ali Noorani during a Friday conversation with GBH’s Boston Public Radio. “I think it shows that, number one, talent is coming to the United States. And the nation is winning awards because of it.”

The three latest additions to the list include Japanese-American physicist Syukuro Manabe, former Scottsman and chemist David MacMillan, and neuroscientist Dr. Ardem Patapoutian, an Armenian raised in Lebanon who fled to the U.S. in 1986 during the Lebanese Civil War.

The latter, it’s worth noting, worked temporarily as a horoscope writer to pay for his UCLA education, per reporting from the New York Times.

“I hope that everybody who has a bug up their you-know-what about people coming here from other countries reads these stories, [they're] really great,” host Jim Braude said, to which Noorani replied, jokingly, “or at least read his horoscopes.”

Incidentally, many immigrant students who receive their degrees in the U.S. will eventually find themselves unable to attain visas. Noorani called this “one of the ongoing malfunctions, to put it nicely, of the [U.S.] immigration system.”

"You can go to Harvard, get a PhD in microbiology, but you don’t exactly have an automatic path to being able to stay in the United States," he said. "And there’s been for a long time a push to, the way they put it... staple a green card to a STEM degree."

Noorani also took pause to recognize the accomplishments of American immigrants whose work will never earn them a prestigious award.

"We often talk so much about the excelling immigrant who wins the Nobel Prize, or is a doctor," he began. "But we all know this: our economy needs the skilled farm worker as much as it needs the skilled engineer. That’s why in these conversations, I think it’s always just important to take a step back and really think how much we depend on the person who's cleaning those buildings, who’s stocking those shelves."

"You don’t win a Nobel Prize for picking lettuce, but it’s pretty darn important," he added.