Reply #31: What you call 'insourcing' has been going on in one form or the other since 1930

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Most people have heard of Einstein and Werner von Braun, but we got a huge influx of other extremely talented physicists, mathematicians, chemists and engineers who helped the American scientific enterprise *immensely*. We got Paul Erdos (most prolific mathematician of the 20th century), John von Neumann (phenomenal computer scientist, mathematician, physicist), Kurt Godel (famed logician), Theodore von Karman (theoretical aerodynamicist and innovator), and I could go on and on.

We welcomed these people with open arms and rightly so. In recent times the numbers have increased and the newcomers are largely non-European - which IMHO is one reason more people are noticing 'foreigners' in the sciences and technology. Obviously, with the larger volume the average quality isn't quite what it used to be. But we still manage to attract some very smart people - One of the winners of the 2006 Fields Medal (the highest honor in math), Terry Tao - is an Australian who is now at UCLA.