The contribution that immigrants can make

Yesterday, when Ed spoke about how some intellectuals fled Nazi Germany and after I spoke with some of you about how European refugees contributed to the Allied victory, I was reminded of an article that I wrote for the Jerusalem Report years ago, when an Israeli professor won a Nobel Prize. I have written more about the contribution that em/immigrants can (and often do) make to a country, but those articles are in Dutch, and - unlike some of my students :-) - I do not rely on Google Translate.

This is the unedited, original version of the article. I use the published version (without my name and picture, obviously: they speak much less freely when they know that the author's opinion happens to be my own) with my older, more advance and mature students when we talk about immigrants and immigration (for example with short stories like "A Summer's Reading" and "Rules of the Game", and it usually works well.

The numbers that appear in the article are correct for (if I remember correctly) 2005. Although the percentages might have changed, the trend (many Nobel Prize winners are immigrants or come from immigrant families) has not. It is the first thing that I check every year when the prize winners are announced :-)

Now that I reread the article, I noticed that it even refers to the Kindertransporte, which happened to be my elective line this week.

Give me your bright, your noble…

Yonathan Dror Bar-On

( Bert de Bruin )

Just as anti-Semites enjoy 'proving' how Jews control the entertainment industry, the media and the world as a whole, some of us love to glory in 'our' contributions to mankind. On www.jinfo.org you can see lists like "Jews in chess", " Jews in sociology", and of course "Jewish Nobel Prize winners". It says that of the Nobel Prize winners 26 % are Jewish or 'half-Jewish', while we make up only approximately 0.25 % of the world population. What is more interesting than such ethnic-religious statistics, though, is the fact that so many of the Nobel Prize winners, Jewish and non-Jewish, come from emigrant families or are emigrants themselves. To anybody who has some spare time left I recommend a visit to www.nobel.org. The (auto)biographies of the winners of this prize of prizes are fascinating reading material. A total of 776 individuals and organizations won the prize since 1901. For this article I took into account only the 563 winners of the prizes for chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, and economic sciences. The choice of winners for the peace and literature prizes is less objective and has often been controversial.

In many of the life stories we read that the scientists, their (grand)parents or ancestors moved to a foreign country ( mostly  the United States, but also Great Britain, France and other countries ) in search of a better or safer life. I found at least 148 winners who for one reason or another left their native country for good, 52 whose parents were emigrants, and 24 whose grandparents emigrated. Americans, who all are or somehow descend from emigrants, make up the majority of scientists whose biography does not specifically mention some sort of emigration.

Several Nobel laureates are Holocaust survivors. Some of them fled or were sent to the United States or England before World War II broke out –  Robert Aumann ( Israel's representative in Stockholm on December 8th ), Walter Kohn ( Chemistry 1998 ) and others – while others survived the war in occupied Europe, e.g. Daniel Kahneman ( Economic Sciences 2002 ) and Rita Levi-Montalcini ( Medicine 1986 ). Not only Jews appear as refugees in the biographies. For instance, the ancestors of at least three laureates were Huguenots who arrived in America after having fled religious persecution in France. Also, not all emigrants in the biographies are refugees. Often a scientist simply went abroad – again, mostly to the US – because of his research or a job offer.

Clearly the work that turned those 563 scientists into Nobel Prize winners constitutes only a small part of outstanding human endeavors and achievements in the last century or so. Also, not all emigrations have been a blessing for the emigrants themselves and/or for the countries that received them. Still, the biographies of the Nobelists suggest that there is a certain connection between 'intellectual mobility', religious-political tolerance and hospitality on the one hand, and a country's prosperity, scientific and cultural bloom on the other. That more than 250 out of the 563 are Americans can hardly be a coincidence. It not only says something about American institutes of higher learning and research, but also might be linked to the US being a country of immigrants. In the Golden Age the Dutch economy and cultural life thrived partly because of the country's colonial enterprises but also as a result of its reputed tolerance, which attracted many Jewish and Protestant refugees. Something similar is true for the Muslim world: it basically reached its zenith when in some respects its tolerance outdid that of Europe.

These days many Westerners tend to see immigrants – and particularly the Muslims among them –  as a burden and a threat rather than as a source of 'fresh blood' that can help to invigorate our societies. An economic recession and stereotyped ideas but also Islam's lack of adaptability and Islamist terrorists can be blamed for this. Nevertheless, the US and other Western countries should not give in to Islamist terror by turning themselves into inaccessible fortresses. Obviously we cannot afford to let terrorists abuse the openness and tolerance of our societies, yet we have to remember that these remain two of our most powerful assets that should be cherished and defended, not sacrificed in our war against terror. Allowing the fanaticism of others to erode our own tolerance and hospitality weakens us and lets the terrorist have their way.