High-skill migrant workers significantly contribute to advanced economies by directly generating knowledge-intensive assets and serving as bridges to knowledge in their origin countries. However, rising populist sentiment has led to increased immigration restrictions in wealthy economies like the U.S. and the Europe Union. This study examines the impact of the 2004 H-1B visa cap reduction on U.S.-based multinational enterprises (MNEs). We use a sample of 371,856 patents assigned to 707 U.S.-based MNEs. We find that post-shock, MNEs increased the geographic dispersion of their global R&D workforce, rather than replacing foreigners with local American workers. Despite this, the firms experienced a decline in innovation performance, likely due to elevated coordination challenges. Interestingly, sectors relying more on codified knowledge demonstrated increased R&D team dispersion with less impact on innovation. This suggests that the geographic proximity of innovation teams is crucial for tacit knowledge-intensive sectors. These findings highlight the complex consequences of immigration restrictions and suggest boundary conditions on the effectiveness of work-from-anywhere models in knowledge-intensive industries.

高技能移民工人通过直接产生知识密集型资产并充当通往其原籍国知识的桥梁，为发达经济体做出了重大贡献。然而，民粹主义情绪的上升导致美国和欧盟等富裕经济体增加了移民限制。本研究考察了 2004 年 H-1B 签证名额降低对美国跨国企业 （MNE） 的影响。我们使用分配给 707 家美国跨国企业的 371,856 项专利样本。我们发现，冲击后，跨国企业增加了其全球研发劳动力的地理分散，而不是用当地的美国工人取代外国人。尽管如此，这些公司的创新绩效有所下降，这可能是由于协调挑战增加。有趣的是，更依赖编码知识的行业表现出研发团队分散性增加，对创新的影响较小。这表明，创新团队的地理接近性对于隐性知识密集型行业至关重要。这些发现突出了移民限制的复杂后果，并提出了知识密集型行业中随时随地工作模式有效性的边界条件。