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Most policy arguments about immigration in the United States rely on some version of the same framework: values, intuition, and selective data points chosen to support a predetermined conclusion. J-P Conte, managing partner, Hoover Institution overseer, and the philanthropist whose investment established the J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration, has spent the past two years building a systematic alternative to that approach — an initiative at Stanford’s Hoover Institution whose explicit purpose is to generate evidence rigorous enough to make the debate more productive.
The January 22, 2026 Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation conference was the initiative’s second annual event, held less than two years after J-P Conte announced the program’s founding in October 2024. Three new academic papers were presented, a panel of practitioners and investors discussed the current policy environment, and Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice offered her own perspective on the stakes involved.
The Core Argument J-P Conte Is Making
J-P Conte has articulated his position clearly and consistently. He believes immigration is an economic asset — that the people who come to the United States to study, work, and build companies generate benefits that extend well beyond themselves, through trade, entrepreneurship, and the knowledge they transmit to the Americans around them. He also believes that argument is poorly served by its current state of documentation, and that the gap between what the research says and what informs policy decisions is both large and consequential.
His remarks at the January conference were direct. “The beauty of America is immigration and innovation,” he said. “And immigration is key to that innovation.” That statement is something he believes — but for the purpose of influencing policy, belief alone is not enough. The initiative exists to build the evidentiary foundation that would make the argument irresistible rather than merely persuasive.
What the Research Has Shown So Far
Across two annual conferences, the initiative has brought forward a set of findings that collectively document the spillover effects of high-skill immigration with unusual precision. US visa tightening from 2017 onward redirected skilled workers to Canada and boosted Canadian exports. American demand for foreign tech workers in the 1990s catalyzed India’s computer science education expansion and ultimately its software export industry. International graduate students in US master’s programs raise the entrepreneurial ambitions of their American classmates. The immigration surge of 2021–2024 contributed to measurable workforce and capital formation gains in the US economy.
None of these findings are politically convenient in a simple sense. They complicate the arguments of advocates on every side. For J-P Conte, that is part of the point: the initiative is not designed to tell policymakers what to think about immigration. It is designed to give them enough accurate information that they can think about it clearly. Two conferences in, the research base is developing. The policy environment in which it lands is as urgent as it has been in decades.
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