We’ve explored the pinnacle of scientific endeavors in AI reporting, from its use in (mostly promising) medical research to its use in utilities and transportation. It is worth noting that many high achievers were not born here.

They came here from all over, but the number of Asians is notable – and in that group, the number of women stands out.

As an immigrant myself, I am interested in why immigrants are so dynamic, so upwardly mobile in their adopted countries. I can distill it down to two things: they have become successful, and for the most part, they are not wronged by the social limits of their upbringing and the expectations shaped by them. America is a clean slate when you first get here.

A friend from Serbia, who climbed the academic ranks and lectured at Tulane University, said his father told him, “Don’t go to America unless you want to make it.”

A South Korean mechanical engineer who studied at American universities and now runs an engineering company trying to alleviate the electricity crisis told me, “I want to try harder and do something for America. I chose to come here. I want to succeed and I want America to succeed.”

When I had lunch in New York with senior staff at an AI startup, I noticed that none of us were born American. Two of the developers were born in India, one in Spain and I in Zimbabwe.

We started talking about what made America a haven for good minds in science and engineering, and decided it was the magnet of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.”

The start-up scientist-engineers agreed – I like the British word ‘boffins’ for scientists and engineers taken together – that if that’s ever going to change, if anti-immigrant sentiment overwhelms judgement, then the flow it will stop, and the talented will not come to America to follow their dreams. They will go elsewhere or stay at home.

Over the past few years, I’ve visited AI companies, interviewed many in that industry, and at big universities like Brown, UC Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford, and companies like Google and Nvidia. The only thing that stands out is how many of those at the top were not born in America or are first generation.

They come from all over the globe. Asians are clearly a major force in the higher fields of American research.

At an AI conference organized by MIT Technology Review, the whole story of what’s happening at the cutting edge of AI was seen: faces from around the world, new American faces. The number of immigrants was amazing, especially from Asia. They were men of the highest order of American science and engineering, confidently adding to the sum of the nation’s knowledge and wealth.

Consider the leaders of top US tech companies who are immigrants: Microsoft, Satya Nadella (India); Google, Sundar Pichai (India); Tesla, Elon Musk (South Africa); and Nvidia, Jensen Huang (Taiwan). Of the top seven, only Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Jeff Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Andy Jassy can be said to be traditional Americans.

A cautionary tale: a gifted computer engineer from Mexico with a family that could have walked off the cover of the Saturday Evening Post lived in the same building as me. During the Trump administration, they returned to Mexico.

There was a typo in his paperwork. The humiliation of being treated like a criminal was such that rather than fight the immigration bureaucracy, he and his family voluntarily returned to Mexico. Losing America.

Every country that has had a large influx of migrants knows that they can bring a lot of unwanted things with them. From Britain to Germany to Australia, immigration has had a downside: drugs, crime and religions that make assimilation difficult.

Yet waves of immigrants built America, from Scandinavian and German wheat farmers who turned the prairies into a vast pantry to German Jews who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and made America preeminent in entertainment, to today’s global wave redefining Yankee know-how in the world of neural networks and quantum computing.

Llewellyn King is the executive producer and host of the “White House Chronicle” on PBS. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.