FROM BORDERS TO BREAKTHROUGHS: HOW IMMIGRATION LAWS SHAPE TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS

Abstract

The innovative capacity of firms fundamentally relies on the organization of strategic human capital. Highly skilled and talented employees drive knowledge creation through their expertise and creativity. As such, the organization and redeployment of knowledge workers across global subsidiaries and teams is a pivotal capability underpinning firms’ competitive edge. However, firms must operate within and adhere to the macro regulatory environments in the countries where they are located. With increasingly global interconnectedness, there is also a rise in nations’ announcing changes to their immigration policies to support national interests. These changes to immigration policies may affect firms' ability to organize human resources in a way that is most conducive for their knowledge creation and innovation objectives. Firms may then respond strategically to meet their innovation objectives while protecting their knowledge from leaking to competitors in foreign or local geographies. This dissertation examines how changes to immigration policies prompt strategic responses from firms in terms of meeting their innovation objectives by reorganizing their human capital and further proposes a three-dimensional framework for an immigration policy that supports economic growth and innovation in the destination country. The first chapter lays the groundwork for the dissertation and review conceptual foundations of each of the following essays. The second chapter examines the strategic response by multinational enterprises (MNEs) when their ability to deploy knowledge workers across national boundaries is affected by restrictive immigration policies. The third chapter examines individual- and firm-level responses to an increase in employees’ bargaining power. Findings reveal that the regulation afforded greater bargaining power to ethnic inventors, leading to greater interfirm mobility, positional changes in the intrafirm collaboration network, and a change in innovation performance. Finally, the fourth essay then argues that in addition to formal human capital, foreign knowledge workers contribute unique social capital which benefits their MNE employers in terms of innovation outcomes and puts forth a comprehensive three-dimensional immigration policy framework integrating migrants’ skillsets with their bridging potential across nations, contingent on inter-state relations. By accounting for security trade-offs and variations in bilateral collaborative intent, this multidimensional perspective allows calibrated screening of talent from allied versus adversarial origins. Synthesized together, the three studies highlight how regulations pertaining to high-skilled immigration significantly disrupt organizations’ access to strategic foreign talent, necessitating trade-offs to reconfigure innovation capabilities. This dissertation contributes to strategic management and international business literature by underlining the global organization of human capital as pivotal to understanding MNE responses to external constraints on foreign talent deployment. Further, it informs immigration policy debates through a multifaceted evaluation of skillsets, bridging ties and bilateral relations that influence productive integration of foreign talent.