Are migrant inventors more productive than native ones?

We contribute to the literature on migration and innovation by comparing the productivity of foreign (Indian) and native ICT inventors in the United States, as measured by the number of patents filed and the number of citations received. We stress that Indian inventors are often more mobile in the destination country, and this could be cause and consequence of higher productivity. We have control not just for migration motives such as education, access to the labor market and cohort effects, but also for internal mobility. We do so by exploiting a rich database that merges classical information on inventors with social media. We compare migrant inventors to mobile and non-mobile natives, finding the former to be more productive. We also find those migrant inventors who entered in the United States while working for the same company perform better than migrants who changed of company or entered for education reasons.