CASE STUDY: Unintended consequences of Trump's America for Americans

«We find immigrants represent 16 percent of all US inventors, but produced 23 percent of total innovation output, as measured by number of patents, patent citations, and the economic value of these patents. Immigrant inventors are more likely to rely on foreign technologies, to collaborate with foreign inventors, and to be cited in foreign markets, thus contributing to the importation and diffusion of ideas across borders. Using an identification strategy that exploits premature inventor deaths, we find that immigrant inventors create especially strong positive externalities on the innovation production of their collaborators, while natives have a much weaker impact. A simple decomposition illustrates that immigrants are responsible for 36% of aggregate innovation, two-thirds of which is due to their innovation externalities on their native-born collaborators.»

The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States, Shai Bernstein et al.

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If Robert Merton had written his paper "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action" (1936) in the third decade of the 21st century, MAGA's immigration policies would have played a central role in his research.