The US should grant more green cards to retain tech leaders; Turkish MIT and Caltech grad Erdal Arikan, whose work led to Huawei's 5G lead, had to leave the US
What is the single most significant step the United States can take to sustain the technological predominance it has enjoyed since World War II? Tweets: @dkaushik96 , @siddarthpaim , @dotben , @zacharyparadis , @hansmahncke , @teddyschleifer , @ylecun , @erikbryn , @troutgirl , @charlesmok , @davidtaggart , @robleclerc , @rafat , @ericschmidt , and @foreignpolicy Tweets: Divyansh Kaushik / @dkaushik96 : We blew our ability to lead in the development of and setting standards for the 5G technology... by not granting **ONE** Green Card. Imagine all the technology we're saying goodbye to by not retaining the foreign STEM talent trained at US universities. https://foreignpolicy.com/... https://twitter.com/... Siddarth Pai / @siddarthpaim : Immigration is the United States' secret sauce—including in its competition with China. https://foreignpolicy.com/... @dotben : Why do foreign students applying to US universities have to convince @StateDept they'll return home after graduating? Surely US should staple a green card to the certificate of any post-grad from a top US university? You *want* them to return to China? https://foreignpolicy.com/... Zachary Jean Paradis / @zacharyparadis : How the U.S. forgot immigration was a key advantage blows my mind... but then I remember 30% of the adult U.S. population believes the Sun revolves the Earth and I remember why (mind still blown of course). https://twitter.com/... Hans Mahncke / @hansmahncke : It's beyond comprehension how the United States ended up with a system where illegal immigration is welcomed, while legal immigration is extremely difficult and cumbersome. https://twitter.com/... Teddy Schleifer / @teddyschleifer : Former Google CEO (and big Biden donor) Eric Schmidt with some advice in “Joe Biden should launch an urgent drive to recruit and retain 1 million tech superstars from around the world by the end of his first term in office.” https://foreignpolicy.com/... Yann LeCun / @ylecun : I'd say not just the US but all the liberal democracies in the world. https://twitter.com/... Erik Brynjolfsson / @erikbryn : President Biden should announce a commitment to recruit 1 million of the world's most technically talented individuals to the US by January 2025 - @ericschmidt and Graham Allison https://foreignpolicy.com/... Joyce Park / @troutgirl : This was a platform of the Republican party for half my life. No idea how “make America technologically competitive” became untouchable by both parties. https://twitter.com/... Charles Mok / @charlesmok : US losing out on talents every minute to not only adversaries but allies. Who's listening? Besides deep anti-immigration bias, politicians can even drag down law designed to help US chiptech in favor of partisan politics. Soon US won't be top destination for tech talents anymore! https://twitter.com/... @davidtaggart : Your periodic reminder that neither party has done shit to fix immigration in ages. Just a fundraising/attention grabbing talking point. And putting aside the human cost, and it is not small, it costs the country actual money as well. https://twitter.com/... Rob Leclerc / @robleclerc : On a risk reward basis the US would just be better off giving green cards to people who graduate from CalTech and MIT. https://twitter.com/... @rafat : Incredible anecdote, this. https://twitter.com/... Eric Schmidt / @ericschmidt : You wonder why China is the leader in 5G? Immigration policy ! Read what we need to do to keep America winning and not losing; we desperately need to get the top technical talent from everywhere else into the US NOW https://foreignpolicy.com/... @foreignpolicy : To leverage the United States' greatest advantage over China, the Biden administration should recruit 1 million foreign scientists, programmers, and engineers, Graham Allison and Eric Schmidt write. https://foreignpolicy.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Foreign Policy argument revives a decade-old case: back in 2014, [[a:824920|Paul Graham framed immigration reform as the deciding factor in whether the US stays a tech superpower]]. What is new is the concrete cautionary tale — Erdal Arikan, a Turkish national trained at MIT and Caltech whose channel-coding research became foundational to Huawei's 5G position, could not stay in the country that trained him.
The piece lands amid a cluster of pressure points: foreign-born entrepreneurship in the US posted its first annual decline since 2000 in 2019, and just weeks before this op-ed, [[a:979658|a coalition including Amazon, Google, and Uber pressed DHS to let children of high-skilled visa holders stay past age 21]]. A companion argument ties the same logic to chip subsidies, pairing industrial money with immigration reform to rebuild US manufacturing.
First-order effects
- Foreign STEM graduates at US universities like MIT and Caltech remain exposed to green-card bottlenecks, and the Arikan case gives advocates a named example of talent the US trained but did not retain.
- Eric Schmidt and Graham Allison's proposal to recruit one million foreign scientists and engineers moves from abstract advocacy to a specific policy ask aimed at Congress and the Biden administration.
Second-order effects
- Competing destinations gain ground: Toronto's lead in North American tech-job growth reflects Canada's more welcoming immigration stance, so every unprocessed US green-card queue is a recruiting funnel for Canadian employers.
- Employers keep escalating direct lobbying of DHS — the Amazon-Google-Uber coalition on dependent children shows companies absorbing the cost of federal backlog through their own advocacy.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, standards-setting power follows residency: the 5G episode suggests that where a researcher can live and work determines which nation's firms commercialize and standardize the underlying technology.
- Immigration policy is being reframed as an instrument of tech-industrial strategy — sitting alongside subsidies and STEM investment rather than as a separate labor-market question.
The trend: US technology competition with China is pushing green-card and high-skilled visa policy from a labor issue into a core lever of industrial strategy, with retention failures like Erdal Arikan's cited as the cost of inaction.