Does the US economy run on immigration?

The US economy runs on immigration. Immigrants support crucial industries, pay huge amounts in taxes, take care of children and the elderly, sustain American innovation and — perhaps most importantly — make the country a more attractive destination for multinational investment.
Over the past few years, President Donald Trump, the Covid-19 pandemic and the end of the big Mexican migration wave have combined to reduce immigration substantially. With the economy still depressed, the pandemic still lingering, and the US image tarnished in the eyes of much of the world, President-elect Joe Biden will face an uphill battle to restore population inflows to a healthy level. But there are still a few important actions he can take.
The high-profile humanitarian issues of asylum seekers, refugees and ICE detention centers will no doubt suck up much of the oxygen in the immigration debate — as the focus on Biden’s selection of immigration specialist Alejandro Mayorkas to head the Department of Homeland Security demonstrates. But while those are important issues, Biden can’t afford to forget about other kinds of immigration — especially the influx of foreign researchers and students. In June, Trump issued an executive order halting new visas for scholars from overseas. This action, widely decried by scientists, was extremely foolish at a time when the US was racing to develop new vaccines and treatments for a novel pandemic disease. But it’s also a very bad economic strategy for the long term.
If China is the workshop of the world, the US is its research park. The concentration of high-value industries in America depends crucially on the presence of top research universities, which in turn depend crucially on attracting the best and brightest scholars from all over the globe. Just as Silicon Valley needs engineers to move in from other cities and just as Houston can’t train all its energy industry workers locally, the US—with less than 5% of the world’s population — needs to pull in researchers from abroad in order to maintain its pole position as the center of science. As a pointed illustration of this fact, note that the co-founder and chairman of Moderna, the American company whose vaccine promises to save millions of Americans from Covid-19, was born in Lebanon.
So Biden should immediately rescind the order banning foreign researchers from coming in. His administration should also act vigorously to clear away all of the regulatory and administrative barriers that the Trump administration has erected over the years that make it more difficult for foreign researchers to live and work in the US.
—Bloomberg