Michael Clemens: How Opportunity for Immigrants Creates Opportunity for Everyone

Current debates over immigration policy often frame it as a zero-sum contest—one person’s opportunity coming at another’s expense. Economist Michael Clemens argues the research tells a different story. A professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Government and Policy and a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Clemens has spent more than two decades studying international migration and its economic effects.

International Educator spoke with Clemens about what history and economic research reveal about immigration restrictions, the long-term effects of dramatically restrictive policies, and what’s at stake today.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed.

Could you tell us a little bit about your professional background, your area of expertise? What prompted your interest in the work that you do?

I’m an economist; I got a PhD in economics forever ago, and for the last 21 years I’ve been focused on studying international migration. International migration is fascinating. Just by changing the place that you’re in can change a lot about not just your own life, but about economies.

International migration is a form of international trade. It contributes to innovation and entrepreneurship. It contributes to patenting. It contributes to all kinds of complex changes; it’s more than simply taking a job. It’s something that I think economists are still coming to understand. It’s so complex.

A lot of your recent work is based on an argument that pushes back against a zero-sum view of the economy and the job market. Specifically, against the idea that there is a fixed number of opportunities and that any opportunity—whether it’s a spot in a college classroom or a position in the job market—that’s held by an international student or an immigrant is one fewer opportunity available to U.S. citizens. Could you talk a little bit about that argument?

Well, the zero-sum view is true in a certain sense. If there’s one job that’s available at a particular firm this afternoon and an immigrant takes it, then a nonimmigrant doesn’t. And if a man takes it, then a woman doesn’t. On any given afternoon, one person’s opportunity is another person’s loss.

But nobody really thinks that banning women from taking employment helps men get jobs. And why is that exactly? Well, because it’s about much more than what’s available this afternoon. Where did the job come from? The job comes from economic growth, from entrepreneurship, from people creating firms, from people consuming, from people investing, from people acquiring skills and coming up with ideas of new ways to do things and new ways to interact.

That’s where all jobs come from. And women and men working together contributes massively to creating all of those things. A big reason that any job on a Tuesday afternoon exists is because women and men interact together in the economy to create that job. This is why it would be ridiculous to say that a woman taking a job is a man losing out on one. That example is very easy for people to understand, so I’ve never understood why that intuition falls away when we’re talking about U.S. natives and immigrants.

Why isn’t it zero-sum for a woman to take a job that a man might want? Well, because women do all kinds of other things. Women invest, women start firms, women create new inventions, women work with men to do new things. Women demand products and services that men produce and that aren’t identical to the products and services that men demand. And all of that interaction and complexity create many more jobs than women take.

All of those same things are true of immigrants. Immigrants start firms. They actually start firms at an 80 percent higher rate than native-born people start firms. And that’s across the board—from large firms like Google down to mom-and-pop laundromats. Immigrants invest in human capital, and they invest their financial capital in the country. Immigrants work alongside natives in specialized ways to do things together that they couldn’t do separately. And for exactly the same reason (as mentioned above), it’s not zero-sum for an immigrant to take a job or to take a spot at a university.

The reason I start out talking about men and women is because I think anybody can understand these things. You don’t need to read a lot of economic research to understand that. And I think we can apply those same lessons to thinking about how people differ by place of birth.

To think about the question in a different way, if we carried zero-sum thinking to its logical conclusions and applied that it to immigration policy, what would the long-term scenario look like? What would it look like if we applied the positive-sum view?

We’ve done that many times in American history—pursued immigration policies that serve a zero-sum worldview. One of the most notorious examples is from 1882. It was law until 1943 and de facto policy until 1965—so for 83 years—we had the Chinese exclusion policy in the United States. It was a very popular policy across the political spectrum and across the electorate. It was tremendously harmful to the United States in many ways, including economically. It was de facto reversed in 1965 when a quota of 105 Chinese people per year—that was the quota leading up to 1965, 105 for all of China—was increased to about 20,000. And we’ve had large-scale Chinese immigration since then. We’re now living in the world that for 83 years they were so afraid of, and we see all around us Chinese-Americans making tremendous contributions, economically and in many other ways.

Economic historians—Marco Tabellini and a group of others—have actually studied the effects of Chinese exclusion policy on U.S. workers. Before the policy there had been incipient substantial flows of Chinese workers into some parts of this country, but most parts of the country were not receiving lots of Chinese immigrants. So, Chinese exclusion had a very different impact on areas near San Francisco than it had on Vermont. They used that information to statistically ask, “When different parts of the country were exposed to different degrees to Chinese exclusion, what happened to workers there?” If you were in a place that was heavily affected by Chinese exclusion, did that create more jobs for U.S. natives, or did it actually reduce their job opportunities?

What Tabellini and his coauthors show is that Chinese exclusion caused “occupational downgrading,” which is an economic term for when people end up in occupations that are less remunerative, that are less productive, that are less specialized.

If there are, for example, a lot of Chinese immigrants working on railroads and running laundromats—or the 19th-century equivalent of laundromats, which is what many of them were specialized in, for lack of other opportunities at that time—that meant U.S. natives were not doing those things. Their removal crowds natives into those activities, but it also crowds them away from other things that they could have been doing, maybe things that required native English skills or personal connections or family capital or some of the other things that they had access to.

And that ended up impoverishing U.S. natives in those areas in the long term. Their whole lives took trajectories that involved less productivity and lower earnings due to them being crowded into occupations that were not to their comparative advantage.

The second biggest example predating the present—I call it a paroxysm of zero-sum thinking in this area—is a series of immigration restrictions from 1917 to 1924 that basically closed the door on immigration from outside Northern Europe. The year 1924 added to pan-Asian exclusion: Japanese exclusion, African exclusion, and a de facto exclusion of most of Central Europe and Southern Europe. And it led to a collapse of the foreign-born population of America—from about 15 percent to about 5 percent over the subsequent 30 years. What we’re going through now is the early stages of something quantitatively comparable to that.

Economic historians have also studied the effect of those exclusionary policies in the same way, because different workers in different parts of the country had high exposure to the 1924 immigration shutdown. Those parts of the country had been receiving large numbers of immigrants while others were little affected by it, because they hadn’t been receiving streams of immigrants. So, you can ask again, “What happened to people over many years, after the 1924 immigration shutdown? Did it create more economic opportunity in the places where immigration was heavily affected?” And again, it was the opposite. The 1924 immigration shutdown actually impoverished Americans.

And you wouldn’t see it on a given afternoon. On a given afternoon, you’d see a job that a U.S. native is now doing that an immigrant otherwise would have been doing. But what happens over the longer term is that with more and more Americans doing jobs that don’t suit their advantages, they are less productive. And when there’s less production, there are fewer jobs. There are fewer opportunities over time.

In both of those examples, we see very large shutdowns of immigration that on a given afternoon might seem to crowd native-born people into opportunity, but are in fact fundamentally undermining opportunity for natives. That is what we can expect this time around too.

You mentioned to me a report you recently read on the impact of foreign-born inventors on native-born ones. Can you tell us about some of the paper’s findings?

The report is best understood in the context of the larger discussion about science and innovation in the United States. The U.S. presidential administration recently released its science strategy, Science: A New Golden Age, which explicitly talks about foreign researchers and foreign innovators in the United States and describes them as a sign of weakness. As in, “Why are we so reliant on all of these foreign researchers? Shouldn’t we be investing more in our own people?” This can sound very intuitive for a moment, but the problem is that there’s no such thing as a certain amount of innovation lying around that needs to happen. It’s not that there’s an innovation job that needs to be done, and that if an immigrant isn’t doing it, then a native will show up and just do the innovation that needs to be done.

Innovation is not like a factory production. It’s something that emerges from a completely unexpected dismantling and recombining of old ideas into new ideas, revising old products, revising old ways of doing things and producing things—and creating new ways of doing things, new chemicals, new computer programs, new industries. Innovation evolves in ways that are completely unpredictable and that are typically encouraged by different people coming together. Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google not by accident, but because people with different strengths working together create more than each of us can.

The report I mentioned to you is a very striking piece of research by Shai Bernstein and Rebecca Diamond and coauthors of theirs in which they ask, “What is the role of immigrants in patenting in the United States?” Patenting is just one part of innovation, but it’s a very important part, and therefore part of economic growth and expanded productivity for everyone in the country.

By cross-referencing a patent database with social security info, the report’s authors were able to identify which patent holders are immigrants.

They can then point out that for patents filed in the United States in recent years, 16 percent of inventors—that is, people who file any patent—are foreign born, yet 24 percent of patents are filed by the foreign born. Since a smaller share of people is producing a larger share of patents, that gap tells you immigrants are filing more patents per person, on average, than native-born inventors.

From there, they’re able to measure the spillover effect of an immigrant’s invention on native invention, again using social security records. Because most inventions happen in groups or teams, the researchers look at what happens to those groups and teams when one of the co-inventors passes away (which they can tell by the social security record). Do they keep producing as many inventions or does their production go down? The report’s authors found that it goes down, but it goes down much more if the co-inventor who passed away is an immigrant. Take the immigrant out of the picture and there’s much less patenting by the U.S. natives on the team than there is if a native is removed from the picture.

The way that I interpret the finding is that immigrants are playing specialized roles in inventor teams, and that everybody brings something different to the table, as Sergey Brin and Larry Page did with Google. Also, when you take a crucial ingredient out of the recipe, the whole recipe gets worse. It doesn’t mean that different ingredients are better or smarter than other ingredients. What the findings show is that about a third of the patents filed in the United States are produced by foreign inventors, when you include not only the ideas that they themselves have in patents, but immigrants’ effect on the invention of other people.

That’s a refutation of the zero-sum world. It means that U.S. natives and immigrants working together are inventing more than either of them could separately. And that’s a reason to celebrate the presence of foreign-born inventors in the United States—because Americans make them more productive and they make Americans more productive. That’s good for absolutely everyone because innovation, not just patented innovation, but all kinds of informal and organizational innovation, that’s where economic growth comes from. That is the reason why we are vastly more prosperous now than we were a century ago.

Economic growth doesn’t come from people going to the grocery store and buying the same things and selling the same McDonald’s hamburgers today that they did yesterday. Economic growth comes from new ways of doing things, and the U.S. natives and immigrants working together are the ones who create those things. That’s the fundamental reason why immigrants create far more jobs than they take.

Is this the positive argument for competition in these spaces, that being around people with different skills and backgrounds sparks creativity and new ways of thinking?

Yes, that’s exactly the paradox. When we say the word “competition,” we think of an Olympic competition, which is the ultimate zero-sum game. There’s only one gold medal spot on the podium, and if you get it, I don’t. But when we compete in a school or in an economy, it pushes people toward specializing in what they’re best at. And when we force people out of a competition, we interrupt the process of specialization. Specialization is where economic growth comes from ultimately.

I’ll go back to comparing men and women, because I think it’s intuitive to most people. Suppose married women were banned from teaching in public schools. That’s not a hypothetical example; there were marriage bans, especially in the interwar period, that Nobel Laureate Claudia Golden, among others, has studied. If we were to specifically ban women from teaching math, what’s that going to do? Does that mean there won’t be math teachers? No, there will still be math teachers. You could probably find men to come in and teach math in the classrooms where the married women are no longer allowed to teach math. But should all of these men be teaching math? Or should some of them be doing something else that they’d be better suited for? Saying that men should compete with women in order to teach math is the same thing as saying that women who are really good at teaching math should be teaching math, and men who are not great at teaching math should be doing something else with their lives. That way, they can make their best contribution by specializing in what they’re best at.

That’s how we create jobs for each other. That’s what an economy is. Competition and specialization are intimately linked in that way. But the paradox is that “competition” makes us think of the zero-sum game—of international students competing for slots at universities that native-born students don’t get. But in fact, it’s access to U.S. universities that creates more opportunities for both international students and native students.

And this creates more innovation, creates more jobs, and further expands opportunity.

Absolutely. Even within the walls of the university. Kevin Shih of University of California-Riverside is one of the top economists studying the effects of international students, by looking at time periods with significant variations in the number of international students coming to the United States. After 9/11, there were big swings in the numbers of international students here. He uses that information to ask how many additional seats opened up for native students at that time—and the answer is negative. At the master’s level, every two international students who didn’t come to the United States eliminated a space for natives, by decreasing revenue to universities, shrinking the size of programs, shrinking universities’ ability to open up new programs, new degrees—all of which ultimately reduced educational opportunities for natives.

Again, on a given Tuesday afternoon, if there is a Chinese student in the chair, there isn’t an American in the chair in that classroom of that program on that afternoon. But in the bigger picture, that competition creates more opportunities for everyone. It’s not really that one view (zero- or positive-sum) is wrong and that the other one isn’t. It’s that the positive-sum view of the world is more comprehensive.

Let’s talk about some of your recent work. Your recent paper, Brain Freeze, looks at how proposed U.S. restrictions on international students would affect the United States’ workforce and long-term economic prospects. Could you share a bit more about that, as well as some of the most important findings?

Thanks to NAFSA, I think people are generally aware that the loss of international students is directly harmful to U.S. universities. It’s financially harmful, and that has spillover effects on university towns and other direct economic linkages. What we wanted to study in that Brain Freeze paper was the more indirect effects of international students, because international students are fundamental to productivity increases in the U.S. economy.

Productivity increases in economic growth come from innovation. International students are more innovative than typical immigrants, who are already more innovative than U.S. natives. I’m talking about founding more businesses and patenting more inventions. International students are special. I mentioned Sergey Brin earlier, and he is not the exception. He exemplifies something very real that has big effects on the productivity of the whole U.S. economy.

And there’s quite a lot of research on that. The National Academy of Sciences approached my co-authors (Amy Nice and Jeremy Neufeld) and I, and asked, “What does the economic research literature say about what it would mean for the U.S. economy to lose international students? What would happen if they stopped coming?” This was the summer of 2025. We had to hypothesize what that would mean. Is it going to be a 10 percent decline? Is it going to be a 50 percent decline? We made up a scenario of a one-third decline that seemed relatively reasonable to us. Yesterday, I calculated the decline in F-1 student visa issuance for calendar year 2025, and it was 34 percent lower relative to typical, preceding years. So, by chance, it turned out that something like our projection happened and I expect a further decline.

So, the one that we investigated is a conservative scenario. And we just note the typical transitions of international students into the U.S. labor force and what they do out there. They’re incredibly important to innovation in the United States. I think not many people are aware that of all the employed PhD workers in science, technology, engineering, and math—STEM workers—60 percent are foreign. And half of those studied in this country. So, we’re talking about a third of our research workforce are not just foreign born, but are people who came to the United States as international students and were able by some pipeline to stay. If you interrupt that pipeline, what happens to the STEM workforce, and ultimately what happens to economic growth?

Each of those steps has been quantified pretty carefully, but we haven’t seen anybody link them together. So, we did, and the bottom line is that if that one-third decline is sustained, we would expect a shrinkage of the U.S. economy of somewhere between 200 and 400 billion dollars per year, which is in an economic sense, kind of like all of South Carolina or all of Utah just vanishing from the U.S. economy. That’s a gigantic hit to the economy.

And that’s much larger than the direct effects on university finances or on university towns. Because international students don’t just contribute tuition. The ones who stay found companies, patent new inventions, and contribute to creating entire new industries. That has implications not just for American jobs in those industries, but for the restaurants where those workers eat, for childcare workers, for people who work at those firms rippling around the whole economy. The effects we measure are large, but they’re really quite conservative. As the decline in international students coming here sinks below one third—and I expect it to be much worse than that in years to come—we can expect much bigger losses.

We’ve talked a lot about the economic effects. What can you say about the more qualitative effects of the decline in international student numbers?

There’s a remarkable person I’ve never met but have admired from afar named Kiana Aran. She’s a professor at University of California-San Diego, where she runs a center studying how people age and how to make that process better. She came to the United States as a foreign student in 2002 to study at City College New York and ended up getting a PhD and staying.

She studies biotechnology. She has founded not one, but two companies around products that she invented. She’s filed over 30 patents. She invented a device that can deliver pharmaceuticals through a mucus membrane without a needle—a fascinating array of tools to create entirely new companies, new industries, new ways of taking care of people who are aging or sick. Her work benefits Americans along the way, both directly and indirectly—not just by coming up with technologies to make aging and illness better in the United States, but directly by having native PhD students in her lab, having native coinventors on her patents, having native cofounders of her companies.

And there’s one very striking aspect about her that I didn’t mention, which is that she came in 2002 from Iran. Now, I’m 54. I remember 2002 very well. The spring of 2002 was just a few months after 9/11. Here in Washington, D.C., there had not only been the terrible terrorist attack at the Pentagon, but also the anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill. People were terrified. The Republican president at that time gave a State of the Union speech in which he very explicitly said that Muslims and Muslim countries are not our enemy, they’re going to be our allies in fighting back against this.

It would have been very easy for populist politicians at that time to say, look, we’re just going to shut everything down from Iran and give up Kiana Aran and everything that she may contribute directly and indirectly to this country. But the leaders who could have done that didn’t do it. Since then, we’ve seen her and all of the other people who have come as international students do amazing things in this country over the years. This gives us a glimpse into what we’re going to lose as a result of these policies. It’ll never be easy to see. The closest we can come to seeing it is just to look around us at the people who are contributing so much to this country, people who have come in the past, and understand that it was a decision to allow that to happen and not to block them from coming. And we’re making very different decisions now.

Speaking of the different decisions that are being made now, could you tell us about your latest project, the report on the optional practical training (OPT) fee? We expect news on OPT reform coming soon, so I’m sure we’ll be talking a lot about this in the months ahead.

Basically, the U.S. government is preparing to demand a very large payment in exchange for allowing foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities to stay to do optional practical training and work in the United States. It’s hard to even talk about this, because the proposed rule that will emerge is going to call it the payment a fee. But there is a legal definition of a fee, and this is not a fee—it’s a tax. The reason they don’t call it that is because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn’t have any authority under law to tax, so they are going to call it a fee. I will refer to it as a tax because that’s exactly what it is.

The government is preparing to charge a very large tax—probably $70,000 for the first year of OPT plus an additional $30,000 tax to extend OPT to the 36-month STEM extension. This means that a typical three-year, OPT STEM employment would require a $100,000 payment. It’s not certain exactly who will be forced to pay the fee. I believe it’s likely to be universities, which have the option to try to recoup the money from students. So, it will probably end up being a mix of universities and students who are asked to pay. In my report, I asked the very basic question, what will happen to the use of OPT and what will be the knock-on effects on international student enrollment in the United States?

An important reason for a lot of international students to come to the United States is that it is a route to at least consider staying and integrating with the country or maybe going home. And closing off that opportunity to stay will affect their willingness to come in the first place. We can see roughly the effect that it’s going to have just by looking at the numbers.

Each year, something like 300,000 international students complete degrees at U.S. universities—that is, pre-recent policy, in normal prior years—and very roughly 200,000 go on OPT. So then the question is, how many of the 300,000 wouldn’t have come in the first place if they knew they couldn’t do optional practical training? That question has been studied by two economists who are maybe the leading economists studying international students, Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Kevin Shih, both at the University of California.

They studied past expansions of the OPT program and how that affected international enrollment, in order to ask the reverse question: If OPT were to disappear, how many people would decide not come? And the answer that they come to is that about 10–15 percent of people, if denied the opportunity to do OPT, would not have wanted to come in the first place. That is, it would lead to something like a decline of 10 percent in overall student enrollment if OPT didn’t exist. There are lots of people who would still want to come and benefit from getting a U.S. education, but there’s quite a large number for whom OPT would be the deciding factor and for whom it would no longer be worth it to stay.

However, we have to think far beyond the OPT tax. The OPT tax is coming in the context of an equivalent tax on H-1B visas, which for many people is the other end of the OPT pipeline, making those much less accessible. This is coming in addition to massive hits to university funding, which is creating far fewer opportunities for PhD students, master’s students, undergraduate students. On top of that, changes to H-1B policy that make it much harder for recent graduates who are seeking entry-level jobs—which are H-1B jobs—to have chances in the lottery to get those jobs. Chances in the lottery are now reserved for much more senior workers.

All of these factors, along with direct restrictions on international students, like the duration of status rule, combined are simply going to decimate interest in studying in the United States. It’s going to make this wonderful, amazing product that has been one of our best exports to the world for generations into something that is much more painful to get and much less valuable to acquire. So, when I talk about these effects on international student enrollment from declines in OPT opportunities, I really mean that we can expect this portfolio of actions against international students to have a much larger combined effect.

Related to that, could you explain what that means, that U.S. higher education is an export and one of our most important exports?

In economic terms, an export is anything that a foreign national buys and an import is anything that a foreign national sells. So when a person comes from Honduras to the United States and is a Honduran national, not a U.S. national, but does childcare in California, that is an import of services to the United States in the national accounts. It might look like an import—it’s a person taking care of a child in a room in California—but it’s defined based on the nationality of the economic actor. That’s why a shipment of coffee coming from Honduras to the United States is an import, but also services provided by a foreign person in the United States are also an export to us, an import by us.

When we provide services in the university system to people who are not nationals of the United States, like to somebody who’s on an F-1 student visa, they are purchasing services provided by U.S. nationals and they are not U.S. nationals themselves. That’s an export of services from the United States to foreign nationals. Whether it’s happening here or happening overseas doesn’t make it an export or an import. It’s the nationality of the people involved.

And so higher education is a 40 or 50 billion dollar export industry in the United States right now, a major export industry. Its value to the country goes far beyond the dollars and cents. The influence that the United States has by having former international students in ministries and running companies and in positions of authority all over the world who studied at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill or Gonzaga or City College of New York is just incalculable.

A major part of our leadership in the world has come through people who not only acquired skills here, but acquired connections here, acquired a certain view of the United States that’s hard to develop when you don’t have direct connections to the country—people who spent some of their formative and often, best, years their life here. The loss of that that we are currently incurring is just difficult to calculate.

If readers walk away with one thing from this conversation or your work, what would you like that to be? What’s the major takeaway?

The thing I wish more people understood is that the world is not zero-sum. There isn’t a certain amount of education to be done, a certain amount of companies to be founded, a certain amount of inventions to be patented. We create universities, we create knowledge, we create companies, and we create inventions by working together. And when people who aren’t exactly like each other work together, they make those things newer and better. That is the lesson of economic history. That’s where most economic growth comes from. And I really think it’s quite intuitive to people. I don’t think it’s some arcane knowledge that only economists have. I think people understand that just as men and women complement each other in the workforce, people with different skills contribute to a startup in different ways.

Even at universities, a lot of learning comes not from listening to the professor lecture, but from the students around you. And more different perspectives around you, in the classroom or in the dorm, means more learning for you, not less. I really think people get this. I don’t think you need to read statistical studies to understand it, even though there are statistical studies that document exactly these effects. And that’s why the loss of international students at universities, but also the loss of international students staying to make their contributions in the United States, is not just a loss to them, it’s a loss to everyone. •