{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01791713325867861, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0083986562150056, 'mean_word_length': 5.3144876325088335, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of Highly Skilled Immigrant Workers on American Innovation

Economic growth in the United States significantly benefits from innovation, and policymakers need to fully evaluate whether the current immigration policy boosts the level of innovation. This work focuses on holders of the H-1B visa that are in research-oriented roles, and it demonstrates that these H-1B visa workers contribute to U.S. innovation by filing patents. Detailed patent data and visa data for the years 2008-2019 are merged to analyze the impact H-1B visa workers have on the granted patents for each state and year. The panel regressions show positive and statistically significant associations between the number of H-1B visa workers and the number of patents, and the results are consistent across several model specifications. To alleviate the inherent confounding bias that may simultaneously drive the H-1B visa worker preferences and patenting activities, a two-stage-least-square regression with an instrumental variable is adopted to identify the causal effects of H-1B visa workers on the number of issued patents. The results remain positive and statistically significant even after controlling for confounding factors. Lastly, a topic modeling approach was performed on patent abstracts using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to segment all patents into seven distinct topic areas, and separate regressions are estimated on patents of each topic. Heterogeneous differences between patent topics show that H-1B visa holders primarily boost innovation in computer science and in optoelectronics. Armed with these findings, policymakers should consider reforming visa programs as a means of continuing innovation growth and economic leadership in the United States.