STAT: Biomedical innovation depends on immigrants’ contributions

I am an immigrant who, like many of my immigrant colleagues, feels proud to be contributing to my new country by working hard and creating new jobs for others. Yet our stories — indeed our very existence — make some people in government uncomfortable.

Not long ago, Democrats and Republicans alike talked about building our country’s economic competitiveness by stapling green cards onto the college diplomas of immigrant STEM graduates. That was before the immigration issue got hijacked by a nativist “stealing our jobs” narrative that couldn’t be more wrong.

Earlier this month, I was the proud recipient of an Immigrant Entrepreneur Award from the Massachusetts-based Immigrant Learning Center. On a night that should have been nothing but festive, an undercurrent of fear was palpable throughout the awards event.

In 2002, I came to the United States from Germany (a heritage I share with President Trump) with my wife, Dr. Eri Inoue-Fruehauf. We were both postdoctoral research fellows with two-year scholarships — hers was to study nutritional causes of cancer at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University; mine was at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Gastrointestinal Cancer Program.

Read the full article from STAT: Biomedical innovation depends on immigrants’ contributions