Two voices carried particular weight at the Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation conference on January 22, 2026. One was Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution and former US Secretary of State. The other was JP Conte, the conference’s funder and a managing partner whose own family arrived in America from abroad. Together, their remarks framed the event around a straightforward concern: the United States has long benefited from being the preferred destination for the world’s most skilled workers, and that advantage is not guaranteed to last.
The conference, held at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus, was organized through a research program that JP Conte established and funds, focused on the economics of immigration and its relationship to innovation.
Rice’s Address to Attendees
Rice was direct in her assessment of what is at stake. “We have always been able to welcome the best students from around the world to the USA, because they were free here, free to think outside of the box,” she told attendees. Her remarks were calibrated not as partisan advocacy but as an argument from America’s competitive self-interest. She posed the question plainly: “Don’t we want to be the place where the best and brightest want to come? Yes, we want to be that place and perhaps business leaders understand that the most.”
She characterized the conference itself as a forum for finding what she called “sensible approaches to solve the immigration dilemma” — language that positioned the event as a space for rigor and pragmatism rather than ideology. That framing aligned directly with the purpose of generating evidence that can inform policy rather than simply amplifying existing positions.
JP Conte’s Personal Framing
JP Conte’s own remarks at the event drew on his family’s history to illustrate why the question of high-skill immigration is anything but abstract. His parents immigrated to the United States from Cuba and from France following the Nazi occupation, and he has attributed much of his own professional trajectory to the opportunities that became available to him as a result of their arrival. At the conference, he asked attendees to mentally remove from the technology industry the founders who had arrived as immigrants or studied here on visas. “Just think of a scenario where none of those people were here,” he said.
His conclusion was equally direct: “The beauty of America is immigration and innovation. And immigration is key to that innovation.” For JP Conte, the conference was not merely an academic exercise. It was an extension of a long-standing conviction that understanding immigration as an economic phenomenon — rather than purely a social or legal one — is essential to making wise decisions about it going forward.
Click here to learn more about JP Conte and the Hoover Institution.
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