The Wall Street Journal roasted Donald Trump in a scathing editorial.
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal just handed Donald Trump a brutal reality check, and it did it by turning the spotlight on America’s newest Nobel stars. In a blistering editorial, the Journal’s board used this week’s science laureates to torch Trump’s immigration crackdown, arguing that the same immigrant pipelines he is trying to constrict are exactly what keep the United States competitive and inventive. “Welcoming immigrants to the U.S. is out of fashion on the political right these days,” the board wrote, “that’s short sighted for America’s future prosperity,” and the week’s Nobel roll call was Exhibit A.
Six U.S. residents were among nine Nobel winners in the sciences this year, and half of those U.S. based winners were immigrants. The board did not just toss out statistics, it named names, and the list was a pointed rebuke to restrictionism. French born Michel Devoret and British born John Clarke were highlighted alongside American researcher John Martinis for physics work involving quantum mechanical tunneling, a reminder that cutting edge labs often run on global talent.
Jordanian born Omar Yaghi, who fled his country as a refugee and learned English at a community college in Troy, New York, was hailed for chemistry breakthroughs in metal organic frameworks, the kind of next generation materials science that expands the frontier for energy, climate, and biotech.
The Journal’s message was not coy, immigrants are not an asterisk on the American science story, they are central to it. The editorial pointed to research showing that since 2000, immigrants account for roughly 40 percent of all U.S. based Nobel winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine, with an even higher share in physics and chemistry. “You never know who or how the poorest refugee or migrant might blossom into a world class scientist or entrepreneur,” the board wrote, calling immigration a “force multiplier” for U.S. innovation. For a paper often friendly to Republican tax and trade ideas, the tone was unmistakable, Trump’s immigration agenda is sabotaging the very prosperity case his party claims to champion.
Trump has been not so quietly campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize of his own ahead of Friday’s announcement, pitching his foreign policy as prize worthy while his domestic policy targets the student visas, research visas, and legal pathways that feed American labs. The Journal warned that turning the screws on legal immigration, from hiking H 1B costs for startups to discouraging foreign student enrollment, will push future luminaries to study elsewhere, or to take their degrees and go home. You cannot lock the lab doors and expect the breakthroughs to keep walking in.
This was not a partisan blog calling Trump small minded, it was the house editorial voice of a Murdoch flagship telling the Republican frontrunner that his tough on immigration posture is a slow bleed on American dynamism. The board anticipated the standard defenses, that the White House only targets illegal immigration and that anecdotes are not data, then swatted them away. Anecdotes matter, because science advances one person at a time, one lab at a time, and those people often come from somewhere else before they choose to stay here and build.
