First is a paper by William R. Kerr of Harvard Business School and William F. Lincoln of the University of Michigan, which finds that holders of H-1B visas add substantially to U.S. innovation. It also suggests that immigrant workers may even cause increases in patent activity, a good proxy for innovation, by workers who are U.S. citizens.
In the work, titled "The Supply Side of Innovation: H-1B Visa Reforms and U.S. Ethnic Invention," Kerr and Lincoln built algorithms that recognize likely foreign names on U.S. patent applications.
They used these algorithms to parse 15 years of data to create an estimate of foreigners filing patents in the U.S. The researchers then cross-referenced annual patent tallies for foreign inventors with the numbers of H-1B visas awarded each year.
They also broke down the regional location of H-1B visa recipients and regional location of patent applicants.
Image: Senator-elect Bernie Sanders at his office in Burlington, Vermont. | Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
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