Look, I get the point you're trying to make, and I know you're not trying to be racist or xenophobic, but implying that having a foreign-sounding name make you less than entirely American is a really bad look.

Literally everyone credited in this paper could have been born and raised in the USA with birthright citizenship. I know that, realistically, that's not the case, but jumping to assumptions about individuals based on how ethnic their names sound is a form for casual racism that has absolutely no place in academia.

More importantly, if non-citizens are so much more likely to get admitted to MIT than citizens, it's not the immigration system we should be worried about. We should be worried about our education system that fails to produce highly-educated and motivated adults that qualify for admittance into MIT.

I also need to call you out for even bringing "descendants of immigrants" into this conversation. The children of immigrants have a name in this country: American citizens. We ought not judge people for the national origins of their parents, we should judge them for their academic and professional merits.