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and water. As it happens, all three are beyond mature; they are nearing the end of their useful operating lives and are in desperate need of recapitalization and modernization to accommodate both new needs and the increased demands of our population growth.” The ASCE report quoted Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell as saying, “The longer we wait the more expensive it will be … This is as urgent an imperative as health care.” We have already waited too long—we’ve let things slide for two full decades. The price for making a comeback, for becoming again the people and the country we used to be, is only mounting.

Brain Drain

In March 2010, a large gala dinner was held at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.—black ties, long dresses. But this was no ordinary dinner. There were forty guests of honor. So here’s our brainteaser for readers: We will give you the names of most of the honorees, and you tell us what dinner they were attending. Ready?

Linda Zhou, Alice Wei Zhao, Lori Ying, Angela Yu-Yun Yeung, Lynnelle Lin Ye, Kevin Young Xu, Benjamen Chang Sun, Jane Yoonhae Suh, Katheryn Cheng Shi, Sunanda Sharma, Sarine Gayaneh Shahmirian, Arjun Ranganath Puranik, Raman Venkat Nelakanti, Akhil Mathew, Paul Masih Das, David Chienyun Liu, Elisa Bisi Lin, Yifan Li, Lanair Amaad Lett, Ruoyi Jiang, Otana Agape Jakpor, Peter Danming Hu, Yale Wang Fan, Yuval Yaacov Calev, Levent Alpoge, John Vincenzo Capodilupo, and Namrata Anand.

Sorry, wrong, it was not a dinner of the China-India Friendship Association. Give up? All these honorees were American high school students. They were the vast majority of the forty finalists in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, which, through a national contest, identifies and honors the top math and science high school students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems. As the list of names makes clear, most finalists hailed from immigrant families, largely from Asia.

If you need any convincing about the virtues of immigration, attend the Intel science finals. We need to keep a constant flow of legal immigrants into our country, whether they wear blue collars or lab coats. It is a part of our formula that very few countries can copy. When all of these energetic, high-aspiring people are mixed together with a democratic system and free markets, magic happens. If we want to keep that magic, we need immigration reform that guarantees that we will always attract and retain, in a legal, orderly fashion, the world’s first-round aspirational and intellectual draft choices.

The overall winner of the 2010 Intel contest—a $100,000 award for the best project out of the forty—was Erika Alden DeBenedictis of New Mexico, who developed a software navigation system that would enable spacecraft to “travel through the solar system” more efficiently. To close the evening, Alice Wei Zhao of North High School in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, was chosen by her fellow finalists to speak for them. She told the audience: “Don’t sweat about the problems our generation will have to deal with. Believe me, our future is in good hands.”

We are sure she is right, as long as America doesn’t shut its doors—but that is exactly what it is doing. In the past, the country overcame its shortages in science and engineering talent by importing it. That practice is unfortunately becoming more difficult and less common.

A comment by Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-born scholar of this subject, makes the point pithily: “America is suffering the first brain drain in its history and doesn’t know it.” Wadhwa, an entrepreneur himself, and a senior research associate at the Labor & Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School and an executive in residence at Duke University, has overseen a number of studies on the connection between immigration and innovation. They all show that it is vital to America’s future to nurture that connection and to strengthen our attraction for talent because so many other countries are now strengthening theirs.

“As the debate over the role of highly skilled immigrants intensifies in the U.S., we’re