High-Skill Immigration as the Ultimate Progress Issue
Description
I have a new article up at Human Progress on the importance of high-skill immigration. In the article, I discuss the MAGA alliance between technofuturists and nationalists. People within the Trump coalition act as if these groups have a great deal in common, and in areas like crime and DEI, that is true. But I think there’s a tendency for the pro-progress side to refuse to see how important high-skill immigration is for creating the kind of world that they want.
Among the more intellectual supporters of the 2024 Trump campaign, there was a message that stressed technological progress and a positive outlook toward the future. The American venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” became a touchstone for this group, celebrating the virtues of innovation, abundance, and human agency. Rather than focus solely on grievances or cultural retrenchment, these advocates of progress framed the Trump agenda as a rejection of stagnation and an embrace of the future. They argued that the true enemies of progress were the left-leaning bureaucracies, academic institutions, and regulatory regimes that, in their view, had become hostile to risk-taking and entrepreneurship.
Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel’s famous maxim that “we were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” has become a rallying cry among the tech right. Vice President JD Vance, in a high‑profile speech at the AI Action Summit in Paris, struck many of the same notes, warning against overregulation in the name of safety and stressing that we should expect future developments to make workers more productive rather than put them out of jobs.
The tech right is of course correct not to fear the future and to see technology as the key to human progress, not a threat to it. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has taken us backward on what is arguably the most important issue from an enhanced-growth perspective: openness toward high-skilled immigration.
Human capital—the skills, knowledge, and health of workers—is increasingly the engine of productivity growth, far more so than natural resources or physical inputs. In his 2008 book Triumph of the City, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser shows how American cities have risen or fallen over the past several decades according to their ability to serve as places where smart and talented people can cluster together. Our great industries are built on conglomerations of talent in different locales: tech in Boston and San Francisco; finance in New York City; entertainment in Los Angeles. College towns throughout the country play a similar role on a smaller scale.
And since only a minority of the talent in the world belongs to people born in the United States, immigration is necessary to make sure that the most productive workers can cluster together. According to the Indian American venture capitalist Deedy Das, of the 44 members of Meta’s recently recruited superintelligence team, who can earn packages of up to $100 million a year, half are from China and 75 percent are first-generation immigrants. As of 2024, 46 percent of Fortune 500 companies were launched by first-generation immigrants (108) or their children (123). A 2022 study by the National Foundation for American Policy showed that this same group had founded or cofounded more than half of the US start-up companies valued at $1 billion or more.
Human capital is the key variable determining whether nations succeed or fail. We live in a country that has historically attracted the smartest and most ambitious people in the world, and that is fundamentally more important than things like natural resource endowment or even tax policy, except to the extent that issues like the latter indirectly affect who decides to come here.
We can compare the debate over high-skill immigration with that over DEI by seeing what the world would look like if either side got what it wanted. Take university admissions to top graduate programs in STEM, which are responsible for much of our basic research.
Wokes would like equal racial representation. So if their maximum goals were accomplished, blacks and Hispanics would be around 25%-30% of scientists, leaving maybe 75% of slots to be determined by merit. You have to also factor out the number of underrepresented minorities who get positions even without the benefits of affirmation action, which is certainly higher than zero.
Now imagine a nationalist who wants US companies, labs, and universities to prefer their own citizens. Americans are 4% of the world population. Now, talent is not evenly distributed across the globe, and Americans have certain advantages going for them in any competition, like being from a rich country and already speaking English. If we’re being really generous, we might say that in a purely meritocratic system, about 30% of elite scientists will be Americans.
All of this means that while the DEI advocate must only redistribute a minority of slots to less deserving applicants, the logic of citizen preferences leads to a much more unbalanced outcome.
At MIT, 40% of graduate students are foreign born. Caltech is even higher, at 47%. The fact that Americans are 4% of the global population and still a majority of these schools is interesting, and likely results in part from US citizenship requirements for some sensitive fields and barriers stopping students coming from abroad.
Nativism, then, has much more potential to damage American science than DEI ever could. Of course neither wokes nor nativists can ever expect to get everything that they want, and instead of asking who would be more damaging if they had absolute power, we may approach the question from the perspective of who is likely to do more damage at the margins. I think this comparison still makes restrictionists look worse, given how much foreign talent exists abroad, and how much power the executive branch has on the immigration issue. We’ve already seen a major crackdown on Chinese students based on national security grounds, which we can assume is mostly pretextual given this administration’s tendency to look for any excuses it can find to keep foreigners out of the country.
If your perspective is zero-sum, all you might care about is that in college admissions Americans get the most opportunities. But this is a terrible lens through which to understand public policy issues. From the perspective of stimulating growth and having a more innovative economy, the case for high-skill immigration becomes even stronger. The economic based restrictionist arguments are pure lump of labor fallacy. You don’t “help” Americans or any other group of people by hindering scientific and technological progress.
Many will say it’s good to let in the world’s geniuses, but that we don’t need people who are simply slightly above average. Of course, there’s no reliable way for government to decide who the geniuses are beforehand. Under such a system, Elon Musk wouldn’t have gotten in, and neither would Jensen Huang’s parents. The point is that if you accept large amounts of people who are slightly above average, some percentage of them and their children will turn out to make absolutely massive contributions to society.
What about those who don’t? Well, those migrants will simply improve na
United States
