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Why “Skilled” Immigration Matters
The immigration debate deserves better than this
If you’ve seen Oppenheimer — and it seems a lot of people have — you probably noticed all the accents. In the secretive corridors of the Manhattan Project and pathbreaking university labs, the viewer hears the Italian accent of Enrico Fermi, the Hungarian-inflected English of Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and Kurt Goedel, the Danish inflections of Niels Bohr, and the German accents of Hans Bethe and Albert Einstein. These minds — many of whom came to America to avoid persecution in an increasingly authoritarian Europe — contributed some of the most important insights in the race for the world’s most advanced technology.
It may have seemed risky for American officials to allow a bunch of immigrants and foreigners to play a part in the most secretive endeavor of the war effort, but the strategy paid off. The United States outraced Germany and the Soviet Union in the race for the atomic bomb, and it was immigrants that helped get them there. As Alan Carr, a historian at Los Alamos National Lab, says,
A pretty strong case can be made that the staff’s diversity really made a difference in the success of the effort to build the world’s first atomic devices. If we didn’t have the diversity that we did back then, I think that it would have been a tangible detriment…