J-P Conte’s Initiative on Immigration Announced at Hoover Institution

Few questions in American public life carry as much economic and social weight as how the country manages immigration: who arrives, under what conditions, and what the downstream effects are on labor markets, innovation, and communities. For J-P Conte, managing partner of family office Lupine Crest Capital, that question has never been abstract. His parents, Pierre and Isabel, came to the United States from France and Cuba, respectively, seeking opportunity and freedom they couldn’t find at home.

That history has shaped J-P’s philanthropic engagement with immigration policy. The most formal expression of that commitment arrived in 2024, when the Hoover Institution at Stanford University announced the establishment of the J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration and named the inaugural J-P Conte Family Senior Fellow — both made possible through J-P Conte’s endowment of the programs. The announcement marked a significant expansion of Conte’s involvement with Hoover.

What Is the J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration?

Paola Sapienza, a senior fellow at Hoover, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute, was named to fill the inaugural fellowship role. Her work centers on the intersection of immigration and political economy, a domain where the academic literature has often outpaced public debate. “The J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration will help us advance our collective understanding of immigration’s multifaceted impacts, collaborate with fellow scholars, and bridge the gap between academic research and practical policy solutions,” Sapienza said at the time of the announcement.

Steven Davis, Hoover’s director of research, framed the initiative’s mandate in terms that acknowledge both opportunity and challenge. “Immigration remains a wellspring of American prosperity and innovation. It also brings fiscal and other challenges,” Davis said. “We need policy solutions that harness the benefits of immigration while addressing real concerns about border disruptions, fiscal burdens, the quality of local public services, and housing costs.” J-P Conte’s motivation for funding that work is equally direct. “I believe in the strength of immigration and the power of the American Dream — I owe much of my success to them and to this country,” he has said.

What Does the Economics Research Show About Immigration?

The data on immigrant contributions to American economic output is considerably more detailed than public discourse often suggests.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, foreign-born inventors accounted for just 16 percent of the U.S.-based inventor workforce between 1990 and 2016, yet were responsible for roughly 23 percent of all patents filed during that period. The productivity spillovers are equally striking: when an immigrant inventor died before age 60, co-inventors saw their own patent output fall by 17 percent, nearly double the 9 percent drop recorded after losing a native-born collaborator. Those figures suggest immigrant inventors generate gains that extend well beyond their individual output.

According to the Economic Innovation Group, foreign-born inventors accounted for 30 percent of patents filed across high-priority U.S. industries, including semiconductors, communications equipment, and software, despite holding only 20 percent of jobs in those fields. According to the American Immigration Council, nearly half of the companies on the 2024 Fortune 500 list were founded by immigrants or their children. According to the Congressional Budget Office, above-trend immigration between 2024 and 2034 is projected to contribute $8.9 trillion to U.S. GDP over that decade.

These figures provide the empirical backdrop against which the J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration is conducting its work. One of the initiative’s first major public events — a two-day conference at Hoover in late October 2024, co-organized by Sapienza and fellow senior fellow Stephen Haber — brought together scholars from across the globe to examine immigration’s economic effects in granular terms. Papers covered topics including the impact of legalizing undocumented workers on wage levels and labor mobility, as well as historical research drawn from the Chinese Exclusion Act era. J-P Conte addressed the assembled scholars directly, saying he hoped Hoover would “convene scholarship that demonstrates the extreme value and importance of immigration to the United States during a contentious moment on the issue.”

Why Does Research Infrastructure Matter for Immigration Policy?

The timing of the initiative’s launch coincided with one of the most contested periods for immigration policy in recent American history. For researchers, this environment creates both urgency and risk: the demand for credible data is high, but so is the pressure to produce findings that serve predetermined conclusions.

The infrastructure J-P Conte has funded at Hoover is designed to operate independently of those pressures. The inaugural conference examined trade-offs across multiple dimensions — employment effects in local communities, firm-level productivity gains, wage impacts on native workers, and knowledge diffusion across borders — without orienting findings toward a predetermined outcome. “Immigration is an important economic engine for America that’s helped make our country what it is today, economically and culturally, and hopefully will continue,” Conte said at the October 2024 conference.

For J-P Conte, the initiative also extends a philanthropic approach that prioritizes institutional durability over short-term spending. Across his giving — from the Conte First Generation Fund at 11 universities to a $5 million endowment at UCSF for Parkinson’s and neurodegenerative disease research — the pattern is consistent: fund permanent structures rather than one-time programs, and measure success by outcomes rather than outputs. Rigorous research on one of the most consequential policy questions facing the country, conducted by credentialed economists at a major university, with an endowed position ensuring continuity, fits that model precisely.

Learn more: Hoover Conference Demonstrates How High-Skill Immigration Offers Range of Benefits for US Innovation