Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

Immigration’s role in innovation was important to the United States when the country’s West Coast economy was still dominated by agriculture, and silicon was associated only with sand. The country’s ability to attract Albert Einstein from Germany at the height of the Great Depression played a vital role in awakening President Franklin Roosevelt to the need to create the Manhattan Project.2 Its open door to German rocket scientists after World War II was critical to sending the first man to the moon. With the help of federal investments in basic research at the country’s great universities and President Eisenhower’s support of math and sciences in the nation’s public schools,3 the United States developed an approach to research, education, and immigration that led to decades of global economic and intellectual leadership. The rest of the world studied this model and increasingly emulated it. But Americans increasingly forgot what made it work. And the political support for its various pieces began to fall apart.