Genius isn't a national commodity

When you look at this man, you see a genius. An American inventor well ahead of his time that reinvented how we look at energy and matter. What he was to America at first, though, was a refugee with a degree.

Albert Einstein had established a name for himself in Europe as a mathematician, He was born in Germany, but renounced his German citizenship in favor of Swiss citizenship as he got older. He taught theoretical physics in a few universities, but in 1933, fearing trouble due to his Jewish ancestry, he fled to America.

Albert Einstein was a rich and successful refugee, but a refugee nonetheless. His English was not great, and his degree was awarded from a foreign nation. Regardless, when he wrote a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning him about the possibility of an incredibly powerful German bomb, the American government involved him in a project to achieve nuclear fission first, in the now famous "Manhattan Project".

I don't know if America would accept Einstein today, and that worries me.

He was a foreigner with no immediate job prospects, from a country with many immigrants, he was male, and America already had teachers. Maybe this guy was smarter, but without taking that plunge and allowing him and other immigrants into the country, we would not have known the results this guy could produce. Nuclear fission is somewhat clean energy that is very available in the world, and nuclear power plants power many cities. Nuclear energy can be dangerous, but is can also be extremely helpful if handled responsibly, as Albert Einstein advised when he signed the Russel-Einstein manifesto warning against the irresponsible handling of said bombs.

The moral of this story for my agenda (because lives are just lives, not cautionary tales) is that genius can come from anywhere, it is not a commodity of Americans. It is hard to say who will have a positive impact on the world and who won't, and by neglecting people like Albert Einstein, we may be missing out on what might make America the country that influences the world in the future. We have gotten this far off of innovation. Why should we stifle future innovation with obstructions to immigration?