America's Physics Triumph Amid an Immigration Paradox

Feodor Yevtushenko, Brian Zhang, Joshua Wang, Allen Li, and Agastya Goel

Historic Olympic sweep showcases immigrant contributions to U.S. scientific excellence—just as new policies restrict the pathways that enabled such success

In Paris this July, five American teenagers achieved something unprecedented: they became the first team in the 58-year history of the International Physics Olympiad to sweep all five gold medals. Their victory against 415 competitors from 87 countries represents more than scientific excellence—it embodies the power of America's historic ability to attract, educate, and nurture global talent.

Yet their triumph arrives amid a profound policy contradiction. Even as President Trump celebrated these young physicists at the White House in September, his administration had just implemented the most restrictive changes to skilled worker visas in decades—policies that could have prevented the very immigration pathways that produced this achievement.

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SIDEBAR: Inside the 2025 International Physics Olympiad

The Competition

The 55th International Physics Olympiad took place July 17-25, 2025, at École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, near Paris, under the theme "Physics Beyond Frontiers." Over 415 students from 87 countries participated—more than double the 2024 competition held in Iran.

Competition Format

Theoretical Exam (5 hours): Three multi-part problems covering advanced physics concepts at the undergraduate level. Students must demonstrate deep understanding across mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, modern physics, and other core areas.

Experimental Exam (5 hours): One or two hands-on laboratory challenges testing practical skills, data analysis, and experimental design.

2025 Challenge Problems

Theoretical Questions:

• Galactic Mass Distribution: Students calculated the mass distribution of the Milky Way galaxy using astronomical observations and gravitational theory
• Atmospheric Clock: Modeling a clock mechanism powered by fluctuations in atmospheric pressure, involving thermodynamics and mechanical systems
• Champagne Bubble Physics: Investigating the characteristic behavior of bubbles in champagne, applying fluid dynamics and gas laws

Experimental Challenges:

• Projectile Impact Craters: Students dropped steel balls into sand beds, analyzing relationships between crater diameter and ball energy while determining whether the ball experiences solid friction or fluid drag
• Earth's Magnetic Field Measurement: Constructing Gouy balances to measure the horizontal component of Earth's magnetic field by observing apparent mass changes of objects in magnetic fields

Scoring System Explanation

Why U.S. won 5 golds but finished 2nd in team total:

• Medal awards are based on individual performance percentiles (top 8% get gold)
• Team rankings use combined total scores of all 5 members
• China's top 4 performers outscored U.S. top 4, but China's 5th member (Haoyu Tian, #76, 25.3 pts) scored much lower than U.S.'s lowest scorer (Feodor Yevtushenko, #29, 32.1 pts)
• This 6.8-point difference gave China the team total victory (180.7 vs 176.0)
• Historic achievement: U.S. was the only country to achieve perfect 5-gold sweep

European Performance

Notable absence from top 10: No European countries made the top 10 team rankings, marking a significant shift in global physics education competitiveness.

Best European performers:

• Romania: Ionut-Gabriel Stan (#8, 37.6 pts, Gold) - highest experimental score
• Slovenia: Aljaz Erman (#30, 32.0 pts, Gold)
• Israel: Alon Hart (#37, 31.2 pts, Gold)
• Estonia: Saskia Põldmaa (#48, 29.4 pts, Silver)
• United Kingdom: Harik Sodhi (#49, 29.3 pts, Silver)

European participation: 17 European countries competed, with 3 earning gold medals and 5 placing in the top 50, but none achieved the team depth needed for top-10 status.

Top 10 Country Rankings

Rank
Country
Team Total
Gold
Silver
Bronze
Top Performer
1
China
180.7 pts
4
1
0
Pengyu Tong (#2, 41.2)
2
United States
176.0 pts
5
0
0
Allen Li (#6, 38.8)
3
South Korea
172.4 pts
4
1
0
Hyeokjoon Lee (#1, 43.2)
4
Hong Kong
164.3 pts
4
1
0
Lincoln Liu (#4, 39.6)
5
Taiwan
158.7 pts
3
2
0
Chung-Ta Tsai (#13, 35.4)
6
Japan
158.2 pts
3
2
0
Kento Kakutani (#3, 39.8)
7
India
156.9 pts
3
2
0
Kanishk Jain (#19, 33.3)
8
Vietnam
140.6 pts
1
4
0
The Quan Nguyen (#16, 34.6)
9
Singapore
138.4 pts
1
4
0
Kai Wen Teo (#25, 32.8)
10
Australia
138.3 pts
2
2
1
Houlai Zhou (#14, 35.1)

Medal Distribution

• Gold medals: Top 8% of participants (37 students from 15 countries)
• Silver medals: Next 17% (top 25% overall)
• Bronze medals: Next 25% (top 50% overall)
• Honorable mentions: Next 17% (top 67% overall)

U.S. Team Performance

• Allen Li (#6, 38.8 pts) - Cupertino, CA
• Joshua Wang (#9, 37.3 pts) - Brookfield, WI
• Agastya Goel (#12, 35.5 pts) - Palo Alto, CA
• Brian Zhang (#26, 32.3 pts) - Northville, MI
• Feodor Yevtushenko (#29, 32.1 pts) - Irvine, CA

Note: The U.S. was the only country to achieve a perfect 5-gold-medal sweep

Notable Achievement

U.S. team member Brian Zhang identified an error in the first theoretical question and chose not to answer it. After verification, organizers awarded him full credit, demonstrating the competition's commitment to scientific accuracy.

Beyond Competition

Students participated in cultural activities including Seine river cruises, museum visits, mime performances, and physics lectures by French scientists on topics ranging from nuclear energy to the James Webb Space Telescope. As team member Feodor Yevtushenko noted, "the physics camp community is what makes the competition special."

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The Champions and Their Stories

The gold medalists reflect America's tradition of converting global talent into homegrown excellence. Most notably, Agastya Goel's family story illustrates the generational impact of legal immigration pathways now under severe restriction.

Agastya, a 17-year-old junior at Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, is the son of Ashish Goel, who exemplifies the classic American immigration success story. In 1990, Ashish ranked first among nearly one million candidates in India's brutally competitive IIT-JEE examination before earning his computer science degree from IIT Kanpur. He then came to the United States on a student visa to pursue his Ph.D. at Stanford University, completing it in 1999 and eventually becoming a Professor of Management Science and Engineering while contributing to major technology companies including Twitter and Stripe.

This pathway—legal immigration for education followed by contributions to American research and industry—has been replicated millions of times throughout American history. Each generation of immigrant scientists mentors the next, including their own American-born children who, like Agastya, go on to represent the United States on the world stage.

The team's other members demonstrate sustained excellence within American educational institutions. Brian Zhang, a 2025 graduate of Northville High School in Michigan, spent years preparing through virtual courses and training camps. Feodor Yevtushenko, a junior at University High School in Irvine, California, has been a standout performer across multiple Olympiad competitions, earning gold at the 2023 International Physics Olympiad.

The Immigration-Innovation Foundation

The Physics Olympiad victory illuminates broader patterns in American scientific achievement. Research consistently demonstrates that immigrants who come through legal pathways play a disproportionate role in driving American innovation. Foreign-born workers account for 19.2 percent of STEM workers with a bachelor's degree, 40.7 percent with master's degrees, and 54.5 percent with Ph.D.s—despite representing just 13 percent of the overall population.

Educational attainment among immigrant STEM workers significantly exceeds that of native-born counterparts: 86.5 percent hold at least a bachelor's degree compared to 67.3 percent of U.S.-born STEM workers. Nearly half of immigrant STEM workers hold advanced degrees, compared to only 21.8 percent of native-born workers.

This educational advantage translates into remarkable innovation outcomes. Immigrant STEM workers are more likely to obtain patents and commercialize those patents. Since 2000, immigrants have earned 40 percent of Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics. Of the 277 Nobel Prizes awarded to scientists working in the U.S. from 1901 to 2014, 35 percent went to foreign-born scientists—with 75 percent of those awards coming after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eliminated discriminatory quotas.

The $100,000 Barrier

Against this backdrop of immigrant scientific achievement, the Trump administration on September 19, 2025, implemented a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications—a 2,000 percent increase from previous fees of $2,000-$5,000. This policy change has profound implications for pathways like Ashish Goel's journey from IIT to Stanford to American scientific leadership.

The new fee particularly affects international students on F-1 visas who typically transition to H-1B status after graduation. Students on Optional Practical Training—which allows international graduates to work for one year (three years for STEM fields)—now face a drastically reduced job market as employers reconsider sponsorship costs.

Consider the practical impact: after completing a Ph.D. at Stanford, such a graduate would need H-1B sponsorship to work before obtaining permanent residency. Under current policy, a startup or research institution would need to pay $100,000 upfront to hire a brilliant young Ph.D.—a prohibitive cost given that early-career researchers often earn $60,000-$80,000 annually.

While established tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta—which collectively employ over 20,000 H-1B workers—may absorb these costs for senior positions, smaller companies, startups, and research universities may find H-1B sponsorship financially impossible. This threatens the ecosystem that has historically nurtured scientific talent.

Economic Impact and Global Competition

The economic benefits of immigrant STEM workers extend far beyond individual achievements. In 2022, more than half of U.S. start-ups valued over $1 billion had at least one immigrant founder. At the nation's top seven cancer research facilities, 42 percent of researchers were born outside the United States.

Yet restrictive policies risk driving this talent elsewhere. Between 2019 and 2023, the U.S. fell from first to eighth worldwide in attractiveness to highly educated workers. Countries like Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom offer more straightforward pathways to permanent residency for international graduates, potentially accelerating America's competitive decline.

The challenge facing American policymakers is stark: the U.S. needs more than one million additional STEM workers by 2033—a 10 percent growth rate triple that projected for non-STEM industries—yet current policies may significantly restrict the talent pipeline. Foreign-born individuals make up 43 percent of doctorate-level scientists and engineers, and restrictions on post-graduation work authorization may deter international students from pursuing American graduate education.

The Policy Paradox

The irony is unmistakable: the same administration celebrating the Physics Olympiad team's achievements—which directly result from previous generations of legal immigration—has implemented policies that could prevent similar pathways for future scientists. As one immigration expert observed, "If it applies to next year, $100,000 for an H-1B worker just basically puts it out of the market, and many of these jobs will then just remain overseas."

Alternative pathways exist—O-1 visas for extraordinary ability, direct green card applications through EB-1A and EB-2 categories—but these require higher qualification thresholds and may not accommodate the broader population of skilled international graduates who have historically driven American innovation.

The university research pipeline faces particular risk. Restrictions on post-graduation work authorization may deter international students from pursuing American graduate education, potentially weakening the research infrastructure that has maintained U.S. scientific leadership for generations.

A Crossroads for American Science

The 2025 Physics Olympiad champions embody what happens when America successfully attracts, educates, and retains global talent. Their achievement reminds us that scientific excellence often spans generations—immigrant parents who come seeking opportunities, American-educated children who represent the nation on world stages.

The young physicists who brought home gold medals represent more than individual brilliance—they embody the ongoing story of how immigration has made America a global leader in science and technology. Their success challenges us to recognize that in an increasingly competitive global landscape, where Asian nations now dominate international physics competitions, America's greatest strength remains its historic ability to attract and nurture talent from around the world.

The question facing policymakers is whether America will maintain that tradition or surrender its competitive advantage to nations more willing to welcome the world's brightest minds. The answer may well determine whether future American teams continue to achieve historic victories—or whether they'll increasingly compete against former would-be Americans who found opportunity elsewhere.

As team member Agastya Goel noted, physics taught him that questioning "why everything in the world is the way it is" drives scientific progress. Perhaps it's time to apply that same curiosity to immigration policy, before the next generation of potential champions looks elsewhere for their future.

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Sources

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