All of us hope that our children and grandchildren can grow up in a great and prosperous America. To ensure they can do so will require hard work in a wide variety of endeavors, many of which we can’t even imagine today. What we can predict with near certainty, however, is that a great America will continue to need three things: (1) net immigration to our country (2) advanced science, and (3) a more vibrant Congress.
America Needs Immigrants
One in three Americans of childbearing age do not have or want to have children. As a result, America’s total fertility rate has dropped precipitously for 20 years, falling to 1.60 in 2024 and 1.57 in 2025, far less than the 2.1 replacement rate necessary to maintain America’s population. In the absence of immigration, our population will rapidly age, our economic productivity will wither, and our nation will decline. America needs immigrant scientists, construction workers, doctors and nurses, and more. We expect them to work hard to build America and the overwhelming majority of them are thankful for the opportunity to do so.
President Ronald Reagan in his farewell address to the nation on 11 January 1989 spoke eloquently of America as The Shining City on the Hill.
“In my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get there. That’s how I saw it and see it still.”
President Reagan’s America was diverse - teeming with people of all kinds. His America was free - humming with commerce and creativity. He recognized that America needed walls & borders but understood the tremendous benefit of having doors in those walls & borders - doors that were open to anyone with the will and heart to get there.
President Reagan did not despise poor immigrants yearning to breathe free. He welcomed them and believed with all his heart that America should be open to them and to the world.
America is a nation of immigrants. At one time or another, all of our relatives and ancestors came here from somewhere else. Given half a chance, who in their right mind would not have been tempted to immigrate to such a blessed country, such a land of opportunity? Our ancestors did. The brightest minds of Science and Technology did. The hardest working construction workers did. The most beautiful did, including our current First Lady. And America has reaped untold benefits because they took the risk to immigrate.
America Needs Great Scientists too.
Science and innovation have transformed America since Reagan was President. Thanks to science and innovation, we live healthier and more prosperous lives, and we won the Cold War to boot. We have progressed from transistors to CPU’s and now to GPU’s and TPU’s, from standalone computers to the internet to Artificial Intelligence. Amazing advances in medical science have boosted American life expectancy at birth by 11 years since I was born, reaching nearly 80 years today.
Immigrant scientists played a central role in this transformation. Of all American citizens who have won the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, and medicine since the year 2000, forty percent were born overseas, immigrated to America, and became naturalized citizens. The share is even higher if you include people born Americans to immigrant parents.
They came with their brains and rigorous work ethic because America is a nation of immigrants. They benefited from generous government funding for scientific research - principally from the National Institutes of Health for medicine, from the Department of Energy for the physical sciences, and from Department of Defense for science of national security importance.
In 2017, the new President Trump-45 tried to gut science budgets at NIH and DOE but Congress used its constitutional power of the purse to overrule him. In fact, with the scientific and strategic competition between America and China heating up, Congress granted healthy budget increases to NIH and DOE. In 2025, however, a more supine Congress allowed President Trump-47 to cut the science budgets of NIH and DOE and impose restrictions on talented foreign graduate students studying at American Universities.
Omar Yaghi: A Canary in the Coal Shaft
In December 2025, Omar Yaghi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is a naturalized US citizen, born in Jordan to poor parents, came to America at age 15 virtually penniless to attend junior college, and steadily worked his way up to the distinguished rank of University Professor at the University of California/Berkeley as well as an affiliate scientist at DOE’s Lawarence Berkeley National Laboratory. In many ways, Dr. Yaghi personifies the American Dream.
During an interview on his way to receive his Nobel Prize, Yaghi warned that cuts in scientific research budgets and restrictions on foreign graduate students were undermining the ability of American universities to conduct advanced scientific research.
In June 2026, Yaghi - having lived in America for 46 of his 61 years - left his faculty position at UC/Berkeley for an equally prestigious one at Tsinghua University in Beijing. There, not here, he will be director on an institute using artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials.
What a strategic loss for America.
America Needs Congress to Step Up
President Trump’s ideas about immigration and science are shortsighted and ill-conceived. They are the antithesis of President Reagan’s well-thought-out policies. They will lead to America’s decline not, as Reagan’s did, to a great and prosperous America.
America needs our next Congress - Republicans, Democrats, and Independents - to step up and think strategically about the future of our nation. Our Senators and Congressmen did so with the NIH and DOE science budgets in 2017. They did so consistently during the Cold War. To ensure our children and grandchildren grow up in a great and prosperous America, they can do so once again.
May I add a 4th essential which ties in to the three? We need interested, enlightened, educated citizens who register to vote and then actually vote.
My question about this move is one of loyalty. He accomplished the top prize of his profession in a country that, after he accepted it by becoming a citizen, is struggling with political controversy. Yaghi’s choice is to run to the highest bidder, not to stay and fight for the stability of the program. Watch out China, his loyalty lies with his individual desires of easy access to what he needs to succeed, not the real-world challenges of competition of justification for funding real-world problems.