Not every philanthropist who funds policy research has a direct personal stake in the question being studied. Jean-Pierre Conte does. His parents arrived in the United States from abroad — his father from France following the Nazi occupation, his mother from Cuba in search of independence and a different kind of future. Both came with limited resources and considerable determination. Both built lives that made the next generation’s ambitions possible. Jean-Pierre Conte traces much of his own professional trajectory to the mentorship and access that opened to him because his parents were here.
That history is why Jean-Pierre Conte established the J-P Conte Initiative on Immigration at the Hoover Institution in 2024, and why he funded and organized the initiative’s second annual conference on January 22, 2026 — the Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation event at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. The connection between the personal and the analytical is not incidental to the initiative; it is its animating premise.
The Bridge Between Experience and Evidence
Jean-Pierre Conte has spoken about immigration in two registers throughout his career. One is experiential: the son of immigrants who worked in a restaurant to fund his education, who became the first in his family to attend college, and who went on to build a career in private equity that eventually gave him the resources and platform to give back. The other is analytical: an investor’s habit of looking for evidence, weighing trade-offs, and refusing to accept claims that cannot be verified.
The initiative he built at Hoover captures both registers. It is funded by personal conviction — the belief that immigration to the United States is one of the country’s most important and underappreciated economic assets — but it is structured around rigorous scholarship. Paola Sapienza, the initiative’s inaugural J-P Conte Family Senior Fellow, brings a research background in political economy, financial development, and governance. The papers the initiative commissions are published by academic economists whose methods are subject to peer scrutiny.
What Jean-Pierre Conte Said at the January Conference
At the January 2026 conference, Jean-Pierre Conte made his core argument simply. He asked attendees to visualize what Silicon Valley would look like if prominent founders who immigrated to the United States had never been permitted to come. “Just think of a scenario where none of those people were here,” he said.
He then connected that thought to a statement he has made in various forms over many years: “The beauty of America is immigration and innovation. And immigration is key to that innovation.” For Jean-Pierre Conte, the research his initiative funds is not academic in the dismissive sense of the word. It is an attempt to document, with precision, what the country stands to lose if it gets the next chapter of immigration policy wrong.
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