Science Immigrants

If we were to delve into the autobiographies of a number of inventors, scientists and mathematicians, we would see that a significant number of them come precisely from the category of refugees and immigrants and political asylum seekers. Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Elon Musk are just some of those names. It is estimated that 16-18% of the “work force” in the US in the field of science and engineering comes from the immigrant and refugee class.

The winner of the Fields Medal, the “Nobel Prize for Mathematics” for 2018, is also Caucher Birkar, known for his work in the field of algebraic birational geometry. And immediately two things became the center of media attention: that Birkar is a Kurdish-Iranian refugee in the United Kingdom and that his medal, made of 14-carat gold, was stolen shortly after it was awarded in Rio de Janeiro.

Birkar was born in 1978 in the Kurdish province of Marivan on the Iran-Iraq border, as Fereydoun Derakhshani. He would later take the name Caucher Birkar, which would mean “migrant mathematician” in his native Kurdish language. He finished his basic studies at the University of Tehran, only to quickly escape to the United Kingdom, and after a number of years he was granted political asylum and citizenship of this country.

However, this is far from an isolated case of scientists or mathematicians who had to leave their homeland in search of better working conditions, a better life or fleeing from political crises, oppression and disrespect for human rights and freedoms. For us, in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the first thing that comes to mind is Nikola Tesla, who will become a great American inventor and scientist and only on the soil of the USA will he find working conditions slightly better than those he would have had if he had stayed in the region where born. With its work on alternating current, Tesla will have a global impact and fundamentally change the way we live. However, in our region this is too often overlooked – that Tesla realized and improved most of his inventions in the USA – and the main debates are about whether he was a Croatian or a Serbian scientist.

When we mention Tesla, we should also remember that high-tech billionaire Elon Musk (whatever you think about him) is an immigrant to the USA: the founder and owner of several technology companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, Hyperloop and The Boring Company was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. One of Musk’s compatriots, biologist Sydney Brenner, immigrated to the United Kingdom, and is known for his contribution to the research of genetic regulation of organ development, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 2002.

An even more famous example of an immigrant scientist was Albert Einstein. A Jew, born in Germany, educated in Switzerland, achieved the most significant part of his career in Germany, and because of open anti-Semitism and the rise of Nazi power, he had to defect to the USA in 1933. Seven years later, he acquired American citizenship in addition to his Swiss one.

Several other physicists who were of crucial importance for the development of physics had this fate: Max Born became an English citizen in 1939, while Enrico Fermi defected from Italy to the USA. Fermi was one of the key people in the Manhattan Project, and he also had enormous merit in designing the first nuclear reactor. Born was of Jewish origin, so, like Einstein, he had to emigrate from Germany due to growing anti-Semitic sentiment, while Fermi, although Italian, was married to a Jewish woman and left Mussolini’s Italy for the same reasons.

A number of scientists and engineers of Jewish origin and people who disagreed with the policies of Hitler’s party and what was happening in Germany and Italy found refuge in the USA. Before the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Nobel laureate Niels Bohr first immigrated to England, from where he helped many scientists to leave the area controlled by the Axis Powers, and eventually joined the Manhattan Project in the USA. Another significant figure in this project to create an atomic bomb was Chien-Shiung Wu, who came to the USA from China in 1936 to study physics at Berkeley University. It was she who developed the radiation detection instruments, which were an important segment of the Manhattan Project. She was also the first woman elected to the American Physical Society. In 1954, she became a US citizen.

Here we should also remember Hedy Lamarr, born as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, in a family of Viennese Jews. Until recently, she was mainly known as an actress, but today her talent as an inventor is being mentioned more and more. Namely, at the beginning of the Second World War, she and the composer George Antheil created a torpedo radio-guidance system, such that the enemy could not interfere with it. This invention was patented in 1942, and after the war the importance of this system will be recognized by the army and will be used even during the Cuban crisis.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer, the theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1963 and thus became the second woman in the history of this prize, after Marie Curie, is also an immigrant. The great mathematician Emmy Noether was born in the small town of Erlangen in Bavaria, but in the mid-thirties of the last century, she sought her fortune in the USA, after she was forbidden to work at the University of Göttingen because of her origins.

Rita Levi-Montalcini won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1986 for the discovery of nerve growth factor. She was born in Turin, but in 1947 she moved to Missouri to work at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and is known for the discoveries that led to the creation of the theory of stellar evolution, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930. Today, he is usually called an Indian-American astrophysicist, but the fact is that he spent his entire professional life, from 1937 until his death in 1995, in the USA.

If we delved into the autobiographies of a number of inventors, scientists and mathematicians, we would see that a significant number of them came precisely from the category of refugees and immigrants and political asylum seekers. Most often, they settled in the USA and the United Kingdom, because the main scientific centers, various universities and institutes, are located in these countries. With their work and merits, these people fought for the citizenship of these countries, but in quite a few cases their struggle for better economic working conditions and the progress of science was difficult.

It is especially difficult for young scientists from countries in transition and developing countries to find their place under the sun and a niche where they can peacefully devote themselves to their work, because xenophobia, restrictive measures towards immigration and the socio-economic uncertainty of their position take their toll. This means that many scientists of the new generation will not be able to express their full potential because their alma mater does not provide them with the necessary conditions for work, the countries they come from are politically and/or economically unstable, while in the countries where they could prove to be invisible they are being built walls that narrow possibilities.

Nevertheless, leading scientific institutions are well aware of the potential that lies in talented people who come from other countries. It is estimated that 16-18% of the “work force” in the USA in the field of science and engineering, in general in the STEM field (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – an acronym that covers science, applied science and mathematics) comes from a layer of immigrants and refugees.

According to the National Science Foundation, 42% of people who received doctorates at universities in the USA are immigrants from other countries. According to data from the same institution from 2013 , about 57% of these immigrants come from Asia, 20% from other parts of America, about 16% were born in Europe, 6% are from Africa and about 1% from Oceania.

The USA is truly a country built by immigrants and the main strength of this part of the world is science and technology. However, there is another good side to this story, to which migrants give weight and make a big flywheel of progress. Namely, a study from 2014 . by two professors of economics from Harvard, Richard B. Freeman and Wei Huangje, showed that scientific papers with 4 or 5 authors of different ethnic origin have on average one or two more citations than those written by authors of homogeneous ethnic origin.

In other words, the diversity of ethnic origin in the group of researchers is closely related to the influence and quality of the work. People from different backgrounds bring different perspectives to the team and thus better analysis and research design. Also, people who come from different backgrounds, when they unite, will have a larger network of contacts and the work will reach more people, while the pressure of working in a heterogeneous group represents a greater challenge for the development and exchange of ideas.