A brilliant piece – The Secret of Immigrant Genius: Having your world turned upside down sparks creative thinking by ERIC WEINER
“Scan the roster of
history’s intellectual and artistic giants, and you quickly notice something
remarkable: Many were immigrants or refugees, from Victor Hugo, W.H. Auden and
Vladimir Nabokov to Nikolas Tesla, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud. At the top of
this pantheon sits the genius’s genius: Einstein. His “miracle year” of 1905,
when he published no fewer than four groundbreaking scientific papers, occurred
after he had emigrated from Germany to Switzerland.
Lost in today’s
immigration debate is this unavoidable fact: An awful lot of brilliant minds
blossomed in alien soil. That is especially true of the U.S., a nation defined
by the creative zeal of the newcomer. Today, foreign-born residents account for
only 13% of the U.S. population but hold nearly a third of all patents and a
quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans.”