Do you know why the United States of America beat Nazi Germany in the race to develop the atomic bomb? There were many contributing factors, but one of the most important was the fact that Nazi Germany would not listen to its top scientists who happened to be Jewish. Nazi Germany’s persecution of these scientists for the grave crime of being Jewish, or heaven forbid Polish, sent many of them fleeing right into the waiting arms of the Manhattan Project.
For decades after World War II, America learned this lesson well: as a nation, you want to attract foreign-born scientists, you do not want to push them away to your international competitors. Applying this principle, even to the extent of overlooking a few war crimes, is the reason America was first to the moon and developed the internet.
Under a criminal complaint made public on May 14, 30-year-old Harvard scientist Kseniia Petrova was charged with smuggling biological material into the United States for allegedly failing to declare preserved frog embryos in her luggage when she arrived at Boston Logan International Airport earlier this year. Petrova is Russian-born and was in the United States legally on a valid visa. After she was taken into custody, ICE agents swiftly shipped Petrova off to Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, without letting her contact her lawyer or anyone else first. A judge in the Western District of Louisiana has since ordered that she be returned to Massachusetts for further proceedings.
Donald Trump’s Justice Department is trying to revoke Petrova’s visa and have her deported. While she was born in Russia, she has protested against the Russian Federation and expressed valid fears about returning to Russia.
The crime Petrova has been charged with domestically carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and up to five years of supervised release. The frog embryos were “nonhazardous, noninfectious, and non-toxic,” and Petrova only had them with her in the first place because she was asked to transport them by the leader of her research group at Harvard Medical School.
Again, this is not about simply carrying harmless dead frog embryos into an airport, which is perfectly legal. It is about allegedly failing to disclose harmless dead frog embryos to Customs and Border Patrol officers who wouldn’t know frog embryos from a handful of tapioca anyway.
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Petrova’s case is particularly horrifying and egregious, but it is far from an isolated incident. Trump has been waging a systematic campaign of oppression against universities and foreign-born students.
It is hard to overstate the stupidity of this front in Trump’s war against immigrants. Even setting aside the billions international students bring to the United States while they are studying here, some of the most talented foreign-born students stick around to become America’s top scientists in their fields.
Foreign-born scientists have had an outsize impact on the technological advances that made the United States the economic and military powerhouse that it is today. It is not just the Manhattan Project: out of 342 Nobel Prizes in STEM fields won for work done in the United States, 117 were awarded to foreign-born scientists despite foreign-born individuals making up only about 13% of the total U.S. population.
Try to ignore for a moment whether it is fair to treat an immigrant with a graduate degree differently than an immigrant who is a fieldworker. Don’t get hung up on the general cruelty of these policies. The people who support what Trump is doing don’t care about fairness and enjoy the cruelty. To survive over the next three years, this has to be about raw, unadulterated national self-interest.
If we keep targeting foreign-born students and scientists, that will weaken our military technology. If we keep targeting foreign-born students and scientists, we will lose, perhaps to Russia and China, significant innovations that will prove to be economically dynamic.
On the other hand, we get absolutely nothing positive out of deporting foreign-born scientists, because top scientists are the only individuals presently available who can do what they do. There is not a single domestically born American who could simply step in at a moment’s notice to fill the recently vacated job of a deported foreign-born scientist in a highly specialized field.
Trump has proven capable of changing his mind on policies he comes to believe are actually counterproductive to his priorities, like his quick reversal on the trade war when the stock market crashed and when countries threatened to stop buying U.S. Treasury securities. After all this time, Trump and his supporters are not going to completely reverse their overall position on immigrants and immigration.
But they might be convinced of the wisdom of keeping foreign-born scientists out of it as a little carve out. I think the best shot we have here is arguing from the point of view of American self-interest.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].