Free The Comeback by Gary Shapiro Page A

Moscow immigrated to the United States. That might not seem like much today, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but put yourself in this family’s shoes. They were leaving behind one superpower for another superpower. But the strength of their native land was an illusion, as is so often the case with totalitarian regimes. The Soviet economy—and in turn its military might—was based on the sinister idea that the individual is nothing more than a tool of the state, another set of working hands that must do what a select few government bureaucrats told the individual to do. His or her dreams and talents didn’t matter because he or she couldn’t act on them anyway. All that mattered was the state and its single-minded attempt to govern every action of its citizens.
    The father of this family, Michael, had wanted to be an astronomer, but the Communist Party, unofficially, barred Jews from studying physics because it didn’t trust them with nuclear rocket research. He became a mathematician instead. Then, during a math conference in Warsaw, Michael had a chance to meet colleagues from the United States and Western European nations. That wasthe breaking point, as recounted by journalist Mark Malseed in a 2007 article in the magazine
Moment
. 27 “He said he wouldn’t stay, now that he had seen what life could be about,” recounted his wife.
    Michael finally understood the ruse, as most behind the Iron Curtain did by the late 1970s. The “enemy,” the United States, was their only chance to lead the life they wanted, to be free to do what they wanted. The flow of information from the Free World—the result of advances in innovation—gave the lie to the Communists’ highly complex propaganda machine. This family knew what was waiting for them in America, and it wasn’t what they had been told all their lives.
    It was opportunity.
    Michael and his family were granted permission to leave the Soviet Union. Going with them was Michael’s six-year-old son, Sergey. Years later, Malseed reports, Sergey returned to his native land with his father, who was leading a two-week exchange program for his math students. Malseed writes:
    On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.”
    As his father had eleven years earlier, seventeen-year-old Sergey finally understood the ruse.
    It’s a touching story, and not at all unique in the short history of the United States. I’m glad I came across it while researching this chapter on immigration, too. You know how I found it? I Googled, of course. Or you could say I found it by using the very search engine Sergey Brin, along with his colleague Larry Page, invented in 1996, and which stands as one of the most consequential
    innovations in our time. Nice work, Communists. You could have had Google first.
    Instead, Google is an American innovation because we accepted the Brins into the country so that they could find a better life. But neither is Sergey Brin, for all his success, at all unique. We also accepted Intel founder Andy Grove (Hungary), eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (France), and Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang (Taiwan). The list goes on. There are the well-known: Alexander Graham Bell (Scotland); and the not-so-well-known: Emile Berliner (Germany), inventor of the phonograph.
    Which leads to the obvious question: Where would America be without these foreign-born innovators? What would America’s economy even look like?
    It’s a scary thought when you consider the “what-ifs.” What if the United States had denied the Brins entry because they were from the Soviet Union—an avowed enemy of the United States? The simple fact is that immigrants are an instrumental part of American innovation and economic growth.
    It’s easy enough to say that we are a nation of immigrants. Almost all Americans are immigrants or descended