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.
The US is accidentally conducting Operation Paperclip but in reverse. Who will benefit the most from it, China or Europe ?
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 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).
> 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.
In total, China has roughly the same amount of immigrants as Ireland.
Probably Europe. Seems more attractive for researchers. China is probably too different to be attractive for most Americans.
It's not too different for ethnic Chinese researchers, of which there are a lot in American STEM departments.
Even if not a single researcher goes from the US to China, it may still benefit them
This reads more like The Netherlands hopes to bribe US researchers into moving to the Netherlands.
why do you call paying someone legally a "bribe" ?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Top researchers in what?
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.
Top. Men.
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
Another news article in English: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/07/top-us-scientists-come-to-n...
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...
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.
Assume you are correct, and the Dutch offer a terrible proposition. Yet still they come.
Hopefully it isn't lithography researchers.
Why hopefully?
Experts in flies reproduction leave fro Netherlands.
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Great, more homes for sale should help make them more affordable for those who stay.
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”.
I think you meant to write "boomers."
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.
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.
Hacker News really isn't what it used to be, huh.
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.
It's not for doing nothing, it's for fooling around at the edge of knowledge. Sometimes, very useful stuff emerges.
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