More than 30 million people migrated to the USA between late-ninetieth and early-twentieth century, and thousands became inventors. Drawing on a novel dataset of immigrant inventors in the USA, we assess the city-level impact of immigrants’ patenting and their contribution to the technological specialization of the receiving US regions between 1870 and 1940. Our results show that native inventors benefited from the inventive activity of immigrants. In addition, we show that the knowledge transferred by immigrants gave rise to new and previously not exiting technological fields in the US regions where immigrants moved to.

中文翻译：

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大规模移民时代的移民与发明

90 世纪末至 20 世纪初，超过 3000 万人移居美国，数千人成为发明家。利用美国移民发明者的新数据集，我们评估了 1870 年至 1940 年间移民专利对城市层面的影响及其对接收美国地区技术专业化的贡献。我们的结果表明，本土发明者从发明中受益移民活动。此外，我们表明，移民转移的知识在移民移居的美国地区产生了新的和以前没有退出的技术领域。