>From my personal experience, people who are successful usually come from highly educated and/or wealthy families .. [from overseas]. FTFY

As someone acquainted with the insides of AI labs, and who has worked with NIWs in the past, I can tell you the extent to which our advances are dependent on migrant brainpower long ago crossed the "we're able to deny it" threshold.

Most people think of skilled immigration as H1Bs. It's not. H1B is to NIW as TF/PyTorch monkey is to real AI expert. They're just not, at all, the same thing.

There are plenty of H1Bs who are similarly smart but don't want to build weapons though. At the places I worked these folks would always be paid the same as the locals - they really were hired for talent and not to cut costs. Contributors to Linux, GCC, and the like, not your typical software simian. I guess these days one can get an NIW and not work for the Department of Energy?