Research: Arab Inventors Make the U.S. More Innovative
By Sami Mahroum, Georg Zahradnik and Bernhard Dachs
Harvard Business Review
From Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah, a Lebanese-born American serial inventor, to Ahmed Zewail, the 1999 Nobel laureate in chemistry, to Farouk El-Baz, a NASA and MIT scientist who helped plan the Apollo landing, to Elias A. Zerhouni, the 15th director of the National Institutes of Health, Arab immigrants have made major contributions to American science and technology.
As the Trump administration attempts to limit immigration from several Arab states, these contributions deserve extra attention. The problem is that to date there has been little work to document the extent of Arab contributions to American innovation. We recently set out to remedy that, and our analysis suggests that Arab inventors play a major role in U.S. innovation. They also contribute significantly to the success of major U.S. tech companies.
To shed more light on Arab contributions to the U.S. innovation system, we ran an exercise matching Arabic first names with international patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). This data includes patents by people residing in the U.S. and around the world. Our approach has been used before, in a study of ethnic innovation in the U.S. as well as in a study of female inventors.
There are obvious shortcomings to this approach. For instance, many non-Arab Muslims have Arabic first names, such as Mohammad, Ali, or Omar, while some Arabs have non-Arabic names. We tried to mitigate this problem by excluding non-Arab variations of Arabic names that are common for non-Arab Muslims. Another shortcoming is that we were not able to discern whether someone was born in the U.S., though we could tell whether they have patented in the U.S.
Despite these limitations, we believe this analysis is valuable, and an improvement on our limited existing knowledge. Moreover, the immigration policies put forward by the Trump administration do not readily distinguish between Muslim and Arab identities — both appear to be targeted. So our analysis remains relevant, even to the extent that it fails to perfectly distinguish between the two groups. Having acknowledged the ambiguity built into our methods, we will refer to “Arab inventors” throughout this article.
It turns out that the U.S. is a major home for Arab inventors. In the five-year period from 2009 to 2013, there were 8,786 U.S. patent applications in our data set that had at least one Arab inventor. Of the total U.S. patent applications, 3.4% had at least one Arab inventor, despite the fact that Arab inventors represent only 0.3% of the total population. As patents usually have multiple inventors, and Arab inventors often patent jointly with non-Arabs, 2,962 patents, or 1.2%, can be contributed exclusively to Arab inventors. California alone, with 1134 patents, had more patent filings by Arab inventors than any country outside the U.S. It serves as a home for more than one-third of PCT patent applications from Arab inventors in the U.S., and about 16% of all Arab patents worldwide.
Europe is home to far fewer Arab inventors: There were only 1,424 patent applications from EU-28 countries that had an Arab name associated with them. Among countries other than the U.S., the order was the following: France (513 patent applications), Canada (361), Germany (342), Saudi Arabia (307), Japan (279) and the UK (273).
Not only is the U.S. the main home of Arab inventors, but the number of Arab patents increased 62% over 10 years, from 1,826 patent applications from 1999–2003 to 2,962 from 2009–2013. This growth rate was about 2.6 times higher than the respective growth rate of 40% for total U.S. patenting in the same time period.
Arab inventors show some technological specialization in information and communication technologies. They are overrepresented in electrical and communication technology, computing, calculating, and counting. Another large field is medical and veterinary sciences.
Arab inventors also contribute significantly to America’s tech scene, in Silicon Valley, Boston, and elsewhere. Tech entrepreneurs such Amr Awadallah, cofounder of Cloudera, Ayah Bdeir, founder and CEO of LittleBits, Rana El Kaliouby of Affectiva, Sharif El Badawi of TechWadi, Mo Gawdat of Google, and Oussama Khatib, director of the Stanford Robotics Lab, are but a few examples of Arab immigrants making major contributions to America’s innovation scene. This is evident in the patent data: Arab inventors’ contributions to major U.S. tech companies have been increasing dramatically over the last 15 years.
We also looked at data on how Arab inventors who weren’t born in the U.S. immigrate to America. Arabs and people from the Middle East and North Africa in general do not benefit much from the H-1B visa, collectively receiving fewer than 10% of total visas granted to foreign-born skilled workers. While there were around 108,000 students from the Middle East and North Africa in the U.S. in 2016, people from these regions are not among the top recipients of PhDs at U.S. universities. This suggests that the bulk of Arab inventors settle in the U.S. through other immigration channels, such as family reunion and as refugees. This has relevance for the immigration debate going on in the U.S. In 2013 there were approximately 1.02 million immigrants from Arab countries residing in the United States, representing 2.5% of the nation’s 41.3 million immigrants. About 43% of Arab immigrants age 25 and over had a bachelor’s degree or higher, more than the 28% of all immigrants and 30% of native-born adults who did.
Skilled Arab immigrants are more likely than other major ethnic groups to arrive in the U.S. on a non-skilled visa. The recent visa ban on citizens from or born in seven countries in the Middle East and Africa has negative implications for American and foreign companies in the U.S., especially those with R&D operations. The management of R&D projects will become more difficult and less efficient as the movement of personnel between firms’ U.S. and international sites becomes more complicated. Furthermore, projects’ staffing as well as companies’ hiring could become extra sensitive to the potential risk of denial of entry to the U.S., putting logistical conveniences ahead of merit, efficiency, and effectiveness. Finally, both domestic and international companies will have a greater incentive to relocate some of their R&D activities to outside the U.S. in order to avoid the hassles associated with border crossing in and out of the U.S.
Not only do immigrants from Arab countries tend to be in possession of higher education levels than the overall population or other immigrant groups, but highly educated immigrants in general are most conducive to trade flows. Despite the Trump administration’s continued skepticism over trade, research suggests that highly skilled immigrants, particularly those in business development roles, generate over 10 times the value of trade that average immigrants do. President Trump has campaigned on the platform of “making America great again,” but the evidence we have suggests that his punitive visa system will make this a more difficult goal to achieve.
