How Refugees Boosted American Innovation

We’re destroying what made U.S. higher education great

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John von Neumann was, it’s widely accepted, one of the smartest people who ever lived. His biographies are full of passages like this:

At the age of six, he was able to exchange jokes with his father in classical Greek. The Neumann family sometimes entertained guests with demonstrations of Johnny’s ability to memorise phone books. A guest would select a page and column of the phone book at random. Young Johnny read the column over a few times, then handed the book back to the guest. He could answer any question put to him (who has number such and such?) or recite names, addresses, and numbers in order.

As an adult, von Neumann made an impact in a staggering number of fields. He helped to invent game theory. He made significant advances in mathematics. His insights helped make the Manhattan Project a reality. He invented the architecture of the modern computer. His ideas were fundamental to quantum physics and anticipated the discovery of DNA.

Even in the eyes of the smartest people, von Neumann seemed to be in a class of his own. Eugene Wigner (himself no slouch — he won the Nobel Prize in Physics) said that “There are two kinds of people: Johnny von Neumann and the rest of us.” Another Nobel Laureate, Hans…