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.
