Prof. Pierre Azoulay speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Fernandez about new research that highlights how immigrant workers, “account for nearly one-in-five of the top 1% wage earners in the U.S.” Azoulay notes that: “One reason that immigrants do better is that they locate in places that are growing fast and the earnings potential are high. They do not randomly locate around the United States.”
A new study by Prof. Jonathan Gruber finds that helping undocumented immigrants in the U.S. connect with primary care doctors could help reduce ER visits, reports Cara Murez for HealthDay. “The data showed a 21% drop in emergency department use, as well as a 42% drop for folks with high-risk medical profiles,” writes Murez.
Forbes reporter Stuart Anderson spotlights a number of international students who became founders of top U.S. AI companies, including MIT alumni Sébastien Boyer MS '16 and Aditya Khosla PhD '16. Boyer co-founded “FarmWise, which employs AI for precision weeding on farms,” and Khosla co-founded PathAI, a biotech startup that uses AI to “optimize the analysis of patient tissue samples and for other clinical and diagnostic purposes,” writes Anderson.
In a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, MIT President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif and Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, emphasize the importance of ensuring international graduate students can stay and work in the U.S. after graduation. “International graduate students are one of the 21st century’s most valuable resources,” they write. “It is time for the United States to start treating them that way.”
Associate Prof. Sarah Williams speaks with Erin Langer at Metropolis about the Civic Data Design Lab’s Motivational Tapestry, a large woven art piece that uses data from the United Nations World Food Program to visually represent the individual motivations of 1,624 Central Americans who have migrated to the U.S. “By allowing a dialogue to open up and be less defensive, art allows us to understand and conceptualize an issue from a different vantage point,” explains Williams.
Prof. Sarah Williams speaks with Erin Langer at Metropolis about the Civic Data Design Lab’s Motivational Tapestry, a large woven art piece that uses data from the United Nations World Food Program to visually represent the individual motivations of 1,624 Central Americans who have migrated to the U.S. “By allowing a dialogue to open up and be less defensive, art allows us to understand and conceptualize an issue from a different vantage point,” explains Williams.
Forbes reporter Stuart Anderson highlights Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87, a member of the MIT Corporation, and Prof. Hari Balakrishnan as two immigrants who have developed innovative technologies and startups.
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found that senior citizens in the U.S. are more likely to live independently if there are more immigrants in an area, reports Stuart Anderson for Forbes. “The study found a 10-percentage point increase in the less-educated immigrant population in an area reduces by 29% the probability someone 65 years or older would live in a nursing home or other institutional setting,” writes Anderson.
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found that U.S. senior citizens are more likely to live independently if there are more immigrants in an area, reports Stuart Anderson for Forbes. This study suggests that the supply of immigrant labor "affects caregiving arrangements, and allows more older Americans to age in the community,” write the researchers.
A new study co-authored by Prof. Pierre Azoulay finds that immigrants are 80% more likely to start businesses than people born in the U.S., reports Yasmin Amer for WBUR. "[Immigrants] create more firms pretty much in every size bucket," says Azoulay. "They create more small firms, they create more medium sized firms. They create more firms that will grow up to be very large."
Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Boston Public Radio hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan about his latest research on a program designed to increase health care access to immigrants across New York. “We reached out through a variety of mechanisms through non-government organizations through social media and we offered them a program to improve their healthcare. We brought them in and what we did was basically just connect them with doctors,” says Gruber.
A new report by researchers from MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab, the Migration Policy Institute and the World Food Programme investigates the motivations and costs of migration from Central America, and finds that migrants spend $2.2 billion every year trying to reach the U.S., reports Catherine E. Shoichet for CNN. "That is an extreme amount of money," explains Prof. Sarah Williams. "That $2.2 billion is all paid for by the migrants themselves, so the risks, both in terms of debt and personal risk, is borne by the migrant."
Prof. Pierre Azoulay speaks with Forbes reporter Amy Feldman about his research showing that restrictive immigration policies are bad for U.S. entrepreneurship. “You have to think about those folks who didn’t get a visa to study in the U.S. and therefore won’t be in a situation to found a company later on,” says Azoulay.
Noubar Afeyan ’87, a member of the MIT Corporation, speaks with NPR’s Joel Rose about the importance of immigrants and the role of immigration in major scientific advances, including the development of two Covid-19 vaccines. "I think of innovation as a form of intellectual immigration," Afeyan said. "You leave your comforts behind you. You face unrecognizable challenges. You take nothing for granted. You don't feel like in your new country people owe you anything."
Forbes contributor Adi Gaskell highlights a new study by CSAIL researchers that underscores the importance of foreign-born scientists when it comes to breakthroughs in AI. The researchers noted that “If we want the United States to continue to be ground zero for computer science, we need to make sure that our policies make it easy to continue to bring host international researchers to join our institutions.”