The Soviet Scientists Immigration Act of 1992 classified former-Soviet scientists as "exceptional ability" and waived the job-offer requirement, an instrument that lapsed in 1996 and expired in 2006

Pronskikh's Selling the Stock, Not the Cream identifies a specific legal instrument that structured the early window of the émigré career premium: the Soviet Scientists Immigration Act of 1992. Per the paper, the Act "classified former-Soviet scientists as persons of 'exceptional ability' and waived the job-offer requirement" — lowering the entry barrier for a defined population of scientists by removing the usual need for a U.S. employer's sponsoring offer.

Crucially for the paper's timing argument, the instrument had a shelf life: it "lapsed in 1996 and, after a brief revival, expired in 2006." A legal channel that is open for only part of a decade is exactly the kind of structural feature that would make arrival year, rather than individual ability, decisive for outcomes — the mechanism argued in claim-soviet-emigre-career-premium-was-structural-not-ability. The Act is the policy scaffolding around the knowledge-rent story in claim-soviet-expertise-was-finite-stock-depleted-as-it-diffused: it governed who could enter and when, while the value of what they carried decayed on its own schedule.

Unlike the paper's interpretive thesis, these are concrete, checkable legal facts — the Act is public U.S. law — but they are recorded here only as the preprint states them and have not been verified against the statute itself. That verification is routed to question-soviet-scientists-immigration-act-1992-legal-details.