The choice of Satya Nadella as Microsoft chief executive drives home the fact that the US has become the world’s leading technology power by harnessing the skills of millions of skilled Asian immigrants. It is also a vindication, 50 years after the fact, of US President Lyndon Johnson’s legislation to create a “Great Society” that uplifted the poor and ended racial discrimination.

As part of his landmark civil rights initiatives, Johnson signed into law the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, which was then viewed as a minor tweak but had revolutionary consequences. The legislation brought to an end the discrimination in immigration imposed in the 1920s in the form of quotas favouring northern Europeans and excluding Asians and Africans altogether. It decreed that future immigration would be non-discriminatory, and based on skills and family reunions.

By enabling the world’s best brains to come to America, Johnson unwittingly helped make the US the world’s most innovative economy. Big economies such as Germany and Japan, which neither wanted nor received millions of skilled immigrants, depended on homegrown brains. The US, meanwhile, garnered the best brains from the whole world, Asia especially. Wall Street, American academia, business, medicine and law all gained phenomenally. Asian-Americans have won a dozen Nobel prizes.