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Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

https://www.nwo.nl/nieuws/eerste-internationale-wetenschappers-via-het-tulp-fonds-naar-nederland
90•28304283409234•2h ago

Comments

goldenarm•1h ago
The US is accidentally conducting Operation Paperclip but in reverse. Who will benefit the most from it, China or Europe ?
amarant•56m ago
Probably Europe. Seems more attractive for researchers. China is probably too different to be attractive for most Americans.
namenotrequired•52m ago
Even if not a single researcher goes from the US to China, it may still benefit them
em500•48m ago
It's not too different for ethnic Chinese researchers, of which there are a lot in American STEM departments.
skeledrew•24m ago
Chinese are far more open to working in foreign environments/contexts that Americans are, IMO. Just look at the foreign language learning statistics: most Americans tend to only know English, unless their family was fairly recently from a non-English speaking country. Meanwhile the Chinese landing in the US tend to already have decent English education, and dive right into doing what they're there to do.
Cthulhu_•21m ago
For a lot of people it's easier to learn English than Chinese - you wouldn't get far if you don't speak the language in China. English gets you very far in Europe though, most research institutions, universities, high end professions, etc already have English as the going language because of the international character of these places.
est31•50m ago
China is not very immigration friendly to non-han folks, but I guess chinese researchers won't make it to the US and this already will have a great effect on the chinese economy.

Europe is in its own set of problems and it is not in the same situation that US used to be after WW2 (only major economy not affected by bombing).

Europe's problems:

* active major war in Ukraine (lasting longer than Axis/Soviet war in WW2)

* energy supply issues (unlike US it's not energy sufficient and the places that supply it with energy are involved with wars)

* a wall of people aging away from employment and into doctor's and hospital waiting rooms (forcing less investment into research and roads/bridges/railway, more towards stabilizing pensions, healthcare)

* major pieces of the european export economy are being replaced by China (eg chinese car brands eating the lunch of european car brands).

tasuki•41m ago
> China is not very immigration friendly to non-han folks

What do you mean? I've never been to China, but know quite a few non-han white Europeans who lived there for both shorter and longer periods of time. Some studied, others worked there.

John23832•32m ago
In total, China has roughly the same amount of immigrants as Ireland.

China is also objectively becoming more closed, not more open.

coldtea•28m ago
The amount of skilled immigrants, researchers and engineers, matters for this comparison.

Not just the total amount including random people arriving at the coast.

John23832
bergen•22m ago
Is it an accident though? This seems very deliberate
goldenarm•16m ago
Maybe the current administration underestimates the impact of public research, and thinks Silicon Valley appeared out of nowhere.
Dumblydorr•11m ago
Either they underestimate, which is ignorance, or they estimate properly and are anti-truth.

What use do propagandists and fascists have for research? It only stands to continually disprove their lies. They obviously hate science and truth and want it gone, to be replaced with cult of personality and Christian nationalism.

usrusr•16m ago
Not sure if accidentally is the correct term, given the anti-intellectual platform
adam_beck•59m ago
Top researchers in what?
moffkalast•57m ago
Top. Men.
28304283409234•46m ago
And top women: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/07/07/opeens-mochten-we-woord...

Cancer researchers, climatechange, food production, astrophysics, democracy, mental health, Alzheimers, ...

Basically all over the board. But don't worry - you folks still have a president that understands sports really..... REALLY well. /s

pastor_williams•47m ago
From what I can tell

AI, quantum, vaccines, cancer, Alzheimer's, mental health, nuclear energy, climate, food security, astrophysics, democratic resilience

There isn't a full list of fields or researchers because of privacy or not all researchers have told their current institutions about the change.

mono442•59m ago
Isn't much of the science work just taking money for doing basically nothing? I don't think that is a loss for the us.
victorbjorklund•56m ago
Yea, exactly. You should send all your top scientists to Europe. Great idea to get rid of them. Totally just dragging down your country. Send them to Europe.
zipy124•54m ago
No. It is for research that wouldn't be funded by companies, since it is either too risky or has too long of a time-horizon. If all academic research was removed from the world you would notice a vast stagnation in technological progress. This can be confirmed by looking at what technologies have come from this process, and what private research built upon public research.
pjc50•49m ago
Hacker News really isn't what it used to be, huh.
lefra•46m ago
It's not for doing nothing, it's for fooling around at the edge of knowledge. Sometimes, very useful stuff emerges.
estearum•22m ago
For real. How much more do we need to spend to learn that plants crave Brawndo?
cdash•56m ago
This title is such clickbait. All the article talks about is a Dutch fund created to recruit scientists and they have successfully recruited them. At 1 million euros per head.
Forgeties79•51m ago
Seems accurate enough to me. That’s not a ton of money to uproot your life over tbh. Shows there’s willingness to leave with a little bit of incentive.
JSR_FDED•36m ago
They have the first 34 researchers, all from top universities and institutes. That’s a major achievement, because as the article says, every researcher brings new knowledge as well as a whole international network with them.
Cthulhu_•19m ago
Exactly; the biggest company in the Netherlands and its products (ASML and high end lithography machines), is built on top of the works of only a handful of researchers. The US nuclear weapons and space programs were similarly built on top of researchers they got from Europe. This is very much NOT a numbers game, and I want to believe top researchers rate their work and the benefit of humanity higher than a country, especially if that country is backsliding.
petcat•4m ago
> the biggest company in the Netherlands and its products (ASML and high end lithography machines), is built on top of the works of only a handful of researchers.

This is... wildly wrong. ASML is a multi-national company that licenses IP largely from USA and Japan, but also Taiwan and Germany. The actual EUV light source is developed and produced in California by Cymer, which ASML acquired in 2013. But ASML was only permitted to acquire the company under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. Additionally, a huge portion of the photolithography research is directly developed (and owned) but US companies and research organizations such as IBM, Albany NanoTech, and SEMATECH.

There is a reason why ASML's next-generation research photolithography machine is currently being installed and developed in upstate New York, and not somewhere in the Netherlands. The same reason that Cymer is still in San Diego instead of being relocated to Europe.

[0] https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-researc...

[1] https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-...

cactusplant7374•56m ago
Hopefully it isn't lithography researchers.
JSR_FDED•34m ago
Why hopefully?
luma•56m ago
This reads more like The Netherlands hopes to bribe US researchers into moving to the Netherlands.
vincnetas•47m ago
why do you call paying someone legally a "bribe" ?
ericmay•40m ago
In the US we sometimes use the term “bribe” in morally neutral or even positive situations.

It just means giving someone money or a different incentive to convince them to do something they weren’t going to do or were undecided but considering doing and the extra incentive is the catalyst for making the decision.

We also have the legal concept of a bribe but the OP probably wasn’t using it in the legal sense - I.e. accusing the Netherlands of doing something illegal.

Lutger•32m ago
The money isn't really for the researchers personally, but for doing the research. They are merely offered a job at a time where their jobs are on the line in the USA. And not even that, they still have to apply and compete with top researchers from other parts of the world. Really hard to call that a bribe, even in a morally neutral way. At most you could say the Netherlands - and other European countries - are taking advantages of the situation where the USA is abandoning their top researchers.

But for years it has been the other way around. Top talent from the Netherlands has been moving to the US in order to get funding (and a bigger salary).

jasonlotito•10m ago
> In the US we sometimes use the term “bribe” in morally neutral or even positive situations.

I live here in the US. I've NEVER heard the term bribe in a neutral or even positive way. It might be used in a mocking way, as if to mock the idea of bribes, but never seriously.

So, unless you are confusing that mocking nature as morally neutral or even positive, this is incorrect.

blueaquilae•55m ago
Experts in flies reproduction leave fro Netherlands.
bergen•18m ago
The US once was proud of its scientific achievements, now parts of it replaced that with being very proud of their ignorance
drstewart•9m ago
I thought Europe was proud and independent and completely decoupled from the US, why do you need US scientists suddenly? Hmm...
jesdo•54m ago
Great initiative, and good to see that it has an effect. I'm a bit sceptical about the available funds. 1 million over 5 years is a nice starting package (4+ PhD students), but the availability of overall research grant money in the Netherlands has been under pressure for years and is difficult to acquire. Researchers moving here may find it difficult to acquire further grant money compared to US, at least in CS.
Cthulhu_•31m ago
It'll be on top of any other grants and funding available for research though.
Herring•53m ago
America is like a trust fund baby given all the advantages and then the baby goes "fuck it, life is too hard, I am just going to do coke and die early”.
greenavocado•45m ago
I think you meant to write "boomers."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1trcILsBHkE

glimshe•52m ago
Great, more homes for sale should help make them more affordable for those who stay.
greenavocado•47m ago
The article has failed to prove that anybody has taken the bait and left.

> For the researcher, the qualities must, from an international perspective, far exceed what is customary within the international peer group. The institution receives a maximum of €1 million per researcher for the next five years.

Let's be generous and assume you are one of the chosen ones. Your institution will take 20% off the top leaving with you 1million×.80/5 or 160k EUR per year.

After income taxes, your take home pay is €90,868.00 or $103k USD. Not bad for the average man, but not good for a top researcher like they want.

EUR 160k works out to about $182,640. For that level of income in a top tier institution in a state with an income tax like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD you would take home $121,565, or 15% more.

https://thetax.nl/?income=160000&startFrom=Year&selectedYear...

28304283409234•43m ago
Assume you are correct, and the Dutch offer a terrible proposition. Yet still they come.
zipy124•37m ago
Academic pay is standardised in many EU countries. For example in the UK you can look up union rates of pay. At UCL (I'm still currently affiliated as I finish my PhD) the pay for a professor starts at £82,157 and goes up to a minimum of £139,882 for the top band. There is an additional £4,678 on top as a London allowance. This roughly lines up with your figure per year, so seems reasonable as an allocation of cost.

Also there are usually very very generous pension schemes here, so total pay is actually quite a lot higher than stated. In addition there is very generous holiday allowance, 41 days at UCL for instance, since you get extra holidays when the university is closed over certain holiday days.

HelloUsername•47m ago
Another news article in English: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/07/top-us-scientists-come-to-n...
drstewart•28m ago
Will they be exempt from providing ID to post on the internet or nah?
michalpleban•5m ago
I can post on the Internet whatever I want without providing any ID whatsover.
•
23m ago
No, total immigration matters. Human progress is always subject to the law large numbers.

Skilled polish engineers don't want to be the only polish person in the entire country. They want food, culture, community that reminds them of home. Even as they assimilate. That's why the American melting pot works well. It encourages enclaves that touch one another.

China is the opposite of that. You are hard hammered into the Han-ness, immediately. The language, the writing (which is a HUGE hurdle), the food, the way of life.

dataflow•17m ago
> Even as they assimilate. That's why the American melting pot works well.

I feel like a lot of Americans disagree on these nowadays though, no? Source: just look at recent campaigns and elections.

losvedir•7m ago
> American melting pot

For what it's worth, this is the terminology I learned in school decades ago, but I don't think it's preferred anymore. My daughter has a book that calls it a "salad" instead (mixed but retaining their respective properties). I'm probably just old and crotchety but I like that way less.

Cthulhu_•22m ago
This is a hugely loaded statement, but that aside, China is not open to immigrants, that was the original thesis and that hasn't been disproven yet.
est31•29m ago
I've never been to China either. It's a huge country and it probably depends on where you are (hong kong probably friendlier than a random place in the mainland), but from what I heard/read:

* language issues. Many chinese don't speak english. Also a problem in many european countries (esp latin and slavic speaking ones), but at least the european languages are easier to learn. Compare this to Amsterdam, Goteborg, Berlin-Mitte or Kopenhagen where everyone speaks english.

* citizenship is one of the hardest to get in the world.

* I heard complaints about onboarding into the chinese app/digital ID ecosystem.

Cthulhu_•23m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_China has a good summary (click through to its sources); as of 2020 there were about 1.5 million immigrants in China, just under 600K of which from Hong Kong/Macao/Taiwan; as of 2023 there's 12.000 people with permanent residency cards, which would be the expats that live and work there without nationalizing.

For comparsion, in the US as of 2023, nearly 48 million inhabitants (14.3% of total) are foreign-born (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...). Or the Netherlands, 4.4 million of its ~18 million inhabitants are from abroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Netherland...).

jasonhong•27m ago
Whether China is immigration friendly or not is debatable. However, here's a recent announcement from last week:

Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Omar M. Yaghi joins Tsinghua University full-time https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1244/14984.htm

VWWHFSfQ•14m ago
> Europe is in its own set of problems and it is not in the same situation that US used to be after WW2 (only major economy not affected by bombing).

Both Japan and South Korea were equally devastated and yet they managed to build world-class technology industries in the subsequent decades. I think the problems with Europe and the EU are a lot deeper than that.

dataflow•13m ago
> Europe's problems: [...]

Would it be silly to add "general lack of air conditioning" to that list? I imagine at some point it inevitably stops being a joke and starts being a real problem. Have we reached that point yet? [1] [2]

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-frances-june-heatwave...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/heat-wave-european-countries-report-37...

skeledrew•19m ago
"Science work" is NOT doing nothing. All the modern conveniences we have today came through such work, which usually go for long stretches of time before payoff.
VWWHFSfQ•10m ago
> At 1 million euros per head.

Over 5 years...

nyeah•8m ago
[delayed]
koiueo•29m ago
Paying government to make laws allowing you to gain extra profits – lobbying (not a bribe)

Paying mandatory but arbitrary amount to a restaurant on top of your bill – tips (not a hidden fee).

Paying someone an official salary – a bribe.

American logic

Cthulhu_•16m ago
Our Glorious Leader <-> Their Wicked Despot comic comes to mind.
Cthulhu_•18m ago
I for one am still waiting for US tech companies to bribe me to come work for them.
tgv•12m ago
Then the US used to bribe our researchers. It's tit-for-tat in this case.
Cthulhu_•10m ago
This assumes the 1 million is all they get or can use to pay them with. The 1 million is a subsidy, not their salary.

Besides, 90K after taxes is upper middle class. 160K / year is 13K / month which is nearly twice the average income of the richest country in Europe (Switzerland) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...), or top 0.1% according to https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i.

And that's just salary based on that number, it doesn't include other income sources.

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Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

https://www.nwo.nl/nieuws/eerste-internationale-wetenschappers-via-het-tulp-fonds-naar-nederland
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