Skilled and Mobile: Survey Evidence of AI Researchers' Immigration Preferences

Understand

Countries, companies, and universities are increasingly competing over top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) researchers.

• Where are these researchers likely to immigrate and what affects their immigration decisions? We conducted a survey $(n = 524)$ of the immigration preferences and motivations of researchers that had papers accepted at one of two prestigious AI conferences: the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
• We find that the U.S.
• is the most popular destination for AI researchers, followed by the U.K., Canada, Switzerland, and France.