Immigration Law

IMMIGRANT OF THE DAY: ERNESTO BLANCO - SCIENTIST/INVENTOR

By Greg Siskind

Sorry for taking a few days off from posting Immigrants of the Day. Cuban-born Ernesto Blanco entered the US in 1960 as part of the post-Castro exodus from the island nation. Blanco is a faculty member at MIT and has 13 patents for important inventions ranging from biomedical devices to solar devices to aids for the handicapped to industrial and textile systems. One of Professor Blanco's students has a nice survey of some of his niftier inventions on her blog. I also found a report by Philip Peters from 1996 entitled "Invented in the USA: Immigrants, Patents and Jobs" that had this quote from Professor Blanco that I thought worth repeating:

It's the environment here and the way we immigrants think about the United States as a land where great inventions are being made. Immigrants feel the way to break the economic barrier is to invent something that will be of use to large numbers of Americans. We become worthy by using our brains.

Full post as published by Greg Siskind's Blog on February 14, 2008 (boomark / email).