By Numbers rarely tell the whole story, but they establish its scale. At the Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation conference held January 22, 2026, at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, one figure surfaced repeatedly in discussions: two million. That is the current count of active high-skill visas in the US workforce — a number that captures, at a rough level, how deeply the American economy has come to depend on foreign-born talent across industries from technology to healthcare to financial services.
The conference was organized and funded by JP Conte, a managing partner and member of Hoover’s Board of Overseers who established the J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration to support rigorous economic research on the subject. The initiative’s second annual conference brought together academic economists, founders, investors, and policy practitioners — all of them working, in different ways, with that two-million-person reality.
What Two Million Active Visas Actually Mean
The H-1B program is the best-known of the US high-skill visa categories, but it is not the only one. The two million active visas span multiple programs and a wide range of occupations, covering workers who have been hired specifically because US employers believed foreign-born candidates were the best available for those roles. They work across sectors not typically associated with immigration debates: research laboratories, clinical settings, financial institutions, and engineering firms throughout the country.
The concentration of high-skill visa holders in the technology sector has attracted the most public attention, partly because the firms involved are prominent and partly because the H-1B program has become a focal point in broader debates about immigration’s relationship to job availability for American workers. The research presented at JP Conte’s conference did not dismiss those debates — it sought to put evidence alongside them.
The Conference’s Contribution to the Evidence Base
Three papers presented at the event addressed different aspects of what high-skill immigration produces economically. One documented how tighter visa rules redirect workers to other countries, with secondary effects on trade flows. Another traced how American demand for foreign tech talent catalyzed the growth of India’s software industry. A third found that the presence of international students in US graduate programs raises the probability that their domestic classmates will start companies.
JP Conte has articulated the goal of his initiative in plain terms: to generate evidence that can inform policy. The conference’s cumulative findings — aggregated across three papers and a full day of discussion — suggested that the two million active high-skill visas in the US economy are not just a labor supply statistic. They are a connected system of spillovers, incentives, and competitive dynamics. Understanding them requires the kind of careful, multi-dimensional research that JP Conte has made a priority to fund.
