Shirley Leung has a fascinating piece in the Boston Globe today, The Massachusetts Miracle is alive and well. ‘There are a lot of potential Modernas’. Those potential Modernas depend upon the brain power of immigrants.
Ms. Leung’s piece is about how area firms built on Boston brains are leading the way in the fight against Covid-19. She notes that this moment of Massachusetts leadership is “centuries in the making” and “not about one company and one vaccine, but rather of countless doctors and doctorates at dozens of labs and companies that have risen to the occasion to vanquish a virus.”
We know about the centuries in the making—the scientific commitment of schools like MIT, Harvard, and UMass Medical, the firms spun off from the laboratories, the innovators and entrepreneurs, the investments by Governor Deval Patrick and later Governor Charlie Baker. But it got me to thinking, where do we get this endless supply of brain power?
Immigrants, that’s where.
Ms. Leung’s article made me remember a report done in 2012 for the Immigration Learning Center by Dr. Alan Clayton-Mathews of Northeastern and my colleague Dr. Paul Watanabe of UMass Boston, “Massachusetts Immigrants by the Numbers, Second Edition: Demographic characteristics and Economic footprint (find link here). It turns out that a disproportionate amount of the folks we depend on for science are immigrants:
Seventeen percent of adult immigrants hold a master’s degree or higher versus 16.2 percent of native adults. This difference is greater at the doctoral level where 34.6 percent of all doctorates in the state are held by immigrants despite the fact that they comprise only 18.0 percent of the population 25 years or older. This characteristic accounts for their disproportionate share in the state’s science and technology sector as documented in studies such as Borges Mendez et al (2009) and Monti et al (2007) on the role of immigrants in the health and biotechnology sectors. Moreover, the relative abundance of immigrants at the upper end of the educational spectrum is striking for recent immigrants where 19.2 percent have advanced degrees.
It goes deeper than that. Clayton-Mathews and Watanabe broke out immigrants by age group, and put a spotlight on the 25-39 year olds who are the backbone of productivity and scientific advancement:
Of all the doctorates held by Massachusetts residents in this age cohort, nearly half (47.9 percent) are held by immigrants.
This Massachusetts Miracle has been a long time coming, and as Ms. Leung says, will be enduring and crucial to the health, well-being, and economy of our region and the world. A lot of the thanks goes to immigrants.
Something I find historically intriguing from the perspective of studying earlier 20th century Massachusetts history was the degree to which the medical and scientific community was once upon a time extremely anti-immigrant along with other dubious pursuits such as promoting eugenics. Think of someone like Walter Fernauld of the infamous Fernauld schools(Fernhauld was also a big critic of the “white” slave trade and you can actually find those terms used in official Commonwealth documents from the 1910s.
On the other hand in this period you do see a political shift in Massachusetts for example towards “free trade” with MA and New England really being the first area in the North to shift towards this position especially in terms of free trade with Canada in part also giving a political opening for the Democratic Party in the state at that point for the first time since Jefferson and Adams. This starts a long tradition but one often unnoticed of Mass pols when push comes to shove whether they be JFK, Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy(with NAFTA), and Elizabeth Warren(with Trump’s USMCA) always finding a way to support FTA’s even when they go against there political brands(Joe Kennedy Sr. was a notable exception although I don’t really consider him a Massachusetts pol. Kennedy was someone who hanged out with the Lindbergh/Henry Ford crowd in which protectionism was a given). It is important to mention Free Trade as it was often associated with immigration in this period and free trade was often a more palatable way to shift towards a more open pro immigration policy. FDR’s administration largely continued the anti immigrant policies of the 1920 but FDR did reverse the protectionism of his GOP predecessors.
Fascinating comment. Thanks Tim.