Children of Immigrants Are America's Science Superstars

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_866321.html

Adding fuel to the fiery debate over immigration policy, a study released Tuesday shows that top science achievers in the U.S. are overwhelmingly the children of immigrants.

The study, conducted by the National Foundation for American Policy, found that 70 percent of the finalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search competition -- also known as the "Junior Nobel Prize" -- were the children of immigrants even though only 12 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born.

According to the report, children of immigrant parents have been increasingly dominant in the fields of math and science. In 2004, for example, researchers found that 60 percent of the top science students in the U.S. and 65 percent of the top math students were born to immigrant families. Findings were based upon data from the Intel Science Talent Search and the 2004 U.S. Math Olympiad.


Based on these findings, the study concluded that "Liberalizing our nation’s immigration laws will likely yield even greater rewards for America in the future."

Yet providing a path to residency for immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- has proven politically difficult, and some advocates are pessimistic about any significant reform in the near future. Tamar Jacoby, President of ImmigrationWorks USA, a business-focused immigration advocacy group, told HuffPost, "We're in a totally different climate than we were in 2006 and 2007. Immigration has become such an impacted, partisan issue. Never say never -- I hope something can happen -- but it’s hard for me to see [reform] happening any time before the 2012 election."

In particular, debate continues over reforming H1-B visa -- a temporary 3- to 6-year visa for skilled foreign workers. According to the NFAP study, 24 of the 28 immigrant parents of 2011 Intel Science Talent Search winners started working in the United States on H-1B visas and later received an employer-sponsored green card.

Proponents of H1B visa reform, including both the White House and technology companies, say skilled workers should be incentivized to stay in the U.S. and not forced to leave after a certain time period, thereby encouraged to set up rival operations overseas.

While there is some interest on both sides of the immigration debate in keeping skilled workers in the country, Jacoby posits that advocates pushing for comprehensive immigration reform are unlikely to take up the H1-B visa issue independent of their broader reform goals. Said Jacoby: "They want to keep that steam bottled up. It's an 'All or nothing' regime."

"In my view," Jacoby added, "if it was ever a useful strategy, I think it's outlived its usefulness. There haven’t been any fixes. We're just not gonna get the whole package anymore."

Most of those "Science Superstars" have immigrant parents who were legal professional immigrants from India and China. Doesn't really apply to Dreamers.

^ Excellent points.

not really, in my alma mater most science/math majors are of hispanic decent

Also, I feel like a lot of the hispanic parents really push their children to attain the higher education sacrificing a lot more than the american counterparts who are often more laid back and in my experience more likely to have their children attend colleges if they can afford it, something that I have not seen with the hispanic parents who will often times take the longer hours of work to cover as much of the cost as possible.

That is the case with my family, and that is what I have heard from other people, parents like to also show off the fact that their children are attending to college and that is why they are working, its how I know its the similar case for other hispanic families.

A few of the american counterparts that I have seen in college are amazing huge debts through loans even though their parents are working decent jobs and certainly have the money.

There's also the differences in culture, and their handling of finances. Asian cultures are very unlikely to pay on credit, this I was informed by a politician who visited my university observing how he liked to work with china town because they paid everything with cash, or from money that they had. They also tend to be very much involved with their children's education, I have seen a parent with his child in college as he studied making sure he was focused. And they do instill a very high value on their education, you have parachute children in the US, whose parents live overseas and they stay with family members while attending school.

What I find very interesting is indeed the individuals getting educated in engineering programs, they are so predominantly Asian, particularly Indian, Chinese or Japanese. This is not an isolated case to my school, I have been in order programs working in their labs and I would be the only hispanic on the floor, it was pretty weird considering this was back in Miami where hispanics are the vast majority of the population.