Throwing Our Science and Technology Supremacy Under the Bus

And Our Future Strategic Advantage, Too

Foreign-born Americans have played a disproportionate role in building and advancing US science and technology supremacy, a core component of our national security.  So why is the administration seeking to undermine the basis of that supremacy now?

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

*****

In an early chapter of his superb book American Moonshot chronicling the successful American ambition to put a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth, popular historian Douglas Brinkley describes the frantic—and highly sensitive—search for German scientists in the aftermath of World War II.  Germany had a clear scientific edge at the time, particularly in critical rocket propulsion technology.  So the side that found these scientists first, whether the U.S. or the Soviet Union, would gain an immediate upper hand and likely win the emerging global competition.  The stakes were extremely high, if not existential.

Operation Paperclip, the secret US program to spirit these scientists from the chaotic rubble of Germany to quiet scientific laboratories on our shores, was developed in response to this post-war imperative—equal parts technological, political, and strategic.  If we had to sweep under the rug the Nazi ties of some of these scientists, so be it.  Because if we didn’t get our hands on them, the Soviets would.  That would be a colossal strategic blow.  

Wernher Von Braun, the brilliant scientist who had led Hitler’s effort to develop Germany’s cutting edge V-2 rocket technology, was the biggest catch of the bunch.  A deeply ambivalent figure for his official Nazi party membership and his status as an SS officer, Von Braun became the brains and in some ways the brawn behind the American Moonshot—with a gift for publicity and politics to match his scientific prowess.  Once comfortably ensconced in the United States, he published popular articles about space travel and moon landings (his childhood dream) and forged close ties with President Kennedy along the way. 

Ethical ambiguities aside, we were lucky to have found him first.  Von Braun played a pivotal role in pushing and pulling the United States to realize its moonshot ambition, which many observers believed was unrealistic and even foolhardy at the time.  Without him and his fellow German-born scientists, we would have failed, including in imagination and ambition.  Had the bulk of the best scientists gone to the Soviet side instead, the Sputnik launch of 1957 would probably have been definitive game over rather than a mere wake-up call for the United States.  The consequences for the future of our nation—and the world—are unthinkable.  

Naturally, many of these German scientists became naturalized American citizens as soon as they could, including Wernher von Braun.  Most realized they themselves had been lucky too.  Von Braun sure did, acknowledging later he would probably have become a kind of prisoner of war in a laboratory the whole time had the Soviets got him.  The United States offered a much better all around proposition for scientists than the Soviet Union did, and for ordinary people too. 

The space race and broader scientific competition with the Soviet Union lasted over a decade more.  Growing up in the late 60s and 70s, I remember a joke trotted out around the dinner table by my German-born father, who came to the United States in 1958 as part of the tail end of scientists immigrating from Germany.  When US and Soviet rockets would cross paths in orbit, the joke went, one rocket would radio out “Wie Geht’s?” while the other would answer, “Danke, Gut.”  

If not a perfectly accurate reflection of a complex reality, the point was clear.  Rocket science on both sides of the Cold War’s East-West divide was largely developed by imported German brains.  

*****

What Would We Do and Where Would We Be Without Them?

Those German scientists, in turn, are a link in the chain of the larger American story.  America’s scientific and technological supremacy has long been powered by immigrants.  Indeed, we have always prided ourselves on our ability to attract the best of the best from around the world, and to welcome them with open arms as one of our own (if they wished).  It was an essential ingredient of the secret sauce of America.  The contributions of immigrants, especially but not only in science and technology, clearly outpace and outclass those of their native-born counterparts on a per capita basis.  A few familiar illustrative examples:

• 35% of US Nobel Prize winners in science from 1901 to 2024 were foreign born.¹ 

• Immigrants registered 23% of the patents issued to Americans between 1990 and 2016, far disproportionate to their numbers in the overall population.²

• Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children.³

We could go on all day with these kinds of numbers. Long story short, many of the smartest people from all over the world have worked, thrived, and produced wonders among us before and since, but now more than ever.  Indeed, in some ways South Asian and East Asian immigrants have come to play the same pivotal role in our scientific advances and technological prowess today as German scientists did following World War II.  Only now they are active in a much wider range and diversity of fields.  Profiles of cutting edge technology start-ups, ground-breaking scientific research, and top-flight intellectual achievement tell the full story.  Unsurprisingly, most of these brilliant foreigners first come to the United States as students, post docs, or junior researchers.  

And until now, just as we did in Germany decades ago (if less frantically and relying entirely on suasion and the soft power of attraction), one core US diplomatic priority has been to identify and recruit talented people from around the world to come to US universities and research institutions, to facilitate their transition, and to make them feel welcome once here.  If we were lucky, some might decide to stay and—eventually—to naturalize as Americans, like so many had done before them. 

It was a classic win-win. 

Today there are more than a million foreign students in American colleges and universities.  The largest group, totaling over 300,000, come from India.  The second, at around 285,000, come from China.  Dozens of countries follow from there.  During my years as a diplomat in South America, I remember we were striving to get 100,000 promising young people from the continent to go study in the United States.  A small but significant number of these might be expected to produce impressive new breakthroughs in medicine, engineering, energy, IT, and basic science, among a plethora of other fields.  Some of these breakthroughs we might not even be able to imagine right now.

What would we do and where would we be without them?

*****

The more accurate question is where will we be, not would.  Because it’s not clear that they, or their future counterparts, will be here or want to come anymore.   

We are now frankly telling them right to their faces not to.  The signal we send by slashing federal funding for scientific research, freezing visa interviews for foreign students, and canceling or threatening to cancel the visas of foreign students already here (pending a review of their social media feeds or the like) is difficult to describe in rational terms.  Words like chilling, stupid, and counterproductive don’t quite capture the profound idiocy of it.  More like self-immolation.  

Talk about the perverse appropriation of woke.  Keep your thorny, contrarian, unconventional views to yourself (even though that’s in part why you’re here).  Say nothing that might hurt me.  Always walk on eggshells around me.  Never say or write the wrong thing (whatever that might be).  This attitude seems strangely myopic and fearful for a superpower, counterintuitively hypersensitive for a free and open society, psychologically brittle for a democracy that has withstood many seasons and cycles of withering criticism, with the battle scars and the strengths—hidden and visible—to show for it.

*****

Focus on Security is Understandable, but Criticism of US Foreign Policy?

I understand the administration’s stated focus on security, but security vetting is built into the student visa application process from the start.  In the case of those students already here, the vetting has already been done.  As for canceling visas of students from the People' s Republic of China en masse, that would amount to a massive mismatch between actual problem and proposed solution, like taking aim at a tiny black widow with a jackhammer.⁴  How many prominent researchers will we lose to our principal strategic competitor as a result?   If the risks of intellectual property theft remain real and present, the potential costs of sending so many promising students and researchers home are literally incalculable.⁵  Yet another example, if we needed one, of shooting ourselves in the foot to spite our face.

Beyond that, I am confused by the claim that students who criticize the United States or US policy—whether on campuses, in newspaper op-eds, or social media feeds—undermine US foreign policy interests.  (Physical actions or concrete threats of violence are another matter).  I thought democracy depended on the freedom to criticize the government openly without fear of retribution.  I thought free speech was protected under the first amendment.  I thought that the United States, the world’s strongest and longest-standing democracy, welcomed and even thrived on criticism, including from foreigners.  I recall making that very argument repeatedly as an American diplomat.  In countless public presentations about US politics, society, and foreign policy etc., I (like all American diplomats) fielded quite a lot of criticism.  It was par for the course, and most of us get used to it.  I myself learned to parry it comfortably and even to relish it, at least when the arguments were sincere (which is not always the case).  I often responded that well-informed criticism provided a perspective we might not have considered before.  In a best case scenario, it could help us to course-correct.  Not all criticism was useful, of course.  Naive, uninformed, or bad-faith criticism—the kind based on mistaken assumptions or inaccurate information—is not so much dangerous as useless.  I had to tell some people that, too, and did so with gusto at times.

Apart from that, intellectually adventurous young people are by their very nature testing out new hypotheses about the world.  Do we really expect them to embody an early-mid-21st century version of W.H. Auden’s Unknown Citizen, robots or saints for whom there is no official or any other kind of complaint?  As an undergraduate in the 1980s, I myself held certain views that might be seen as “anti-American”.  Though I have since grown out of most of them, those views served me well as an American diplomat.  I knew from personal experience that, rightly or wrongly, my country was not always presumed innocent by others.  When we said (like Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek used to say) that, “we come in peace,” not everyone believed it.  Some even labored under the delusion that all contemporary ills could be traced back to the actions of the United States. (Many still do.) I believe that that gives us far too much credit, and far too little credit to many, many others. But that doesn’t mean we should impose a purity test of pro-American views for incoming students. That would be the Soviet approach, not ours.

Whether the criticism of the United States is well-informed or useful or less so or not at all, the essence of democracy is debate. No progress is possible in the absence of the clash of conflicting opinions.  I had thought this fact was not only obvious, but axiomatic.  Once again, I was wrong.

*****

Grotesque and Extravagant Devices

From time to time I think a great deal about H.L. Mencken’s blistering satirical essay “The Anglo-Saxon” in this connection.  Roughly a century ago, the sage of Baltimore pointed his rhetorical machine gun at misguided nativist sentiment, as embodied in the figure of the Anglo-Saxon:  

“Here in the United States his defeat is so palpable that it has filled him with vast alarms, and reduced him to seeking succor in grotesque and extravagant devices.  In the fine arts, in the sciences and even in the more complex sorts of business, the children of the immigrants are running away from the descendants of the early settlers.  To call the roll of Americans eminent in almost any field of human endeavor above the most elemental is to call a list of strange and even outlandish names; even the panel of Congress presents a startling example.”

Mencken’s momentum builds from there:

“The descendants of the later immigrants tend generally to move upward; the descendants of the first settlers…tend plainly to move downward, mentally, spiritually, and even physically.  Civilization is at its lowest mark in the United States precisely in those areas where the Anglo-Saxon presumes to rule…”

Some things, apparently, never change. 

Here I suddenly recall the provocative immigration reform proposal made half in jest by the heterodox Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez, whom I got to know in San Francisco in the early 90s.  Interviewed on what was then the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour on PBS, Rodriguez (I paraphrase here) argued that Americans tend to grow complacent about their privileges over time, with each subsequent generation tilting increasingly toward asking what their country can do for them instead of vice-versa.  This being the case, by the third or fourth generation when the complacency is complete, people should be kicked out of the country to make room for those who know first-hand how lucky they are to live here—the hardworking, ambitious, hungry-for-opportunity immigrants who contribute so much to our national advancement in so many fields, not just science and technology.  

While Rodriguez’s proposal probably overshoots the mark, there’s just enough truth in it to make one wince.

Regardless, the move against foreign students targets the molten core of America’s attractiveness and power.  It targets our democratic openness, the deep engine of our dynamism, our smart power.  In the strategic competition for global supremacy, smart power will matter most of all in the long run.  Imagine for a moment that the best German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, had gone to the Soviet Union instead.  Now imagine their contemporary counterparts from South Asia, East Asia, and all around the world. Imagine that, no longer feeling welcome, the best of the lot decide to leave or not to come in the first place.  Imagine them going to some other country or staying at home instead.  Imagine certain other countries picking up the slack.

Now imagine those countries lapping us and leaving us choking in the dust, licking our self-inflicted wounds, seeking succor in extravagant and grotesque devices.

Sadly, this is getting less difficult to do these days.

1. https://d101vc9winf8ln.cloudfront.net/documents/51466/original/Nobel_Report_2024_Sandip_Web_Version_Final121124.pdf?1734021888

2. https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/new-look-immigrants-outsize-contribution-innovation-us#:~:text=They%20found%20that%20immigrants%20made,patents%20issued%20over%20these%20years.

3. https://immigrationimpact.com/2023/08/29/immigrant-fortune-500-companies-gdp/

4. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/29/nx-s1-5414341/china-student-visas-rubio

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/visas-china-rockets-scientist-technology.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Lk8.jCmJ.ipPUCTPCzl-u&smid=url-share