On New Year’s Eve, America’s most prominent indigenous activist declared that the country needed more immigrants.
“We need talented people, we need smart people to come to our country,” President-elect Donald Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday. “We need a lot of people to come.”
It may sound as if Trump has been visited by the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future. But it was actually white nationalists in the extreme online who prompted a change in the president-elect’s rhetoric on immigration.
President Trump appointed venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as senior advisor for artificial intelligence on December 22. Racist firebrand and Trump insider Laura Loomer criticized Krishnan’s selection because the Indian-American investor had recently called for increased skilled immigration. According to Loomer, Krishnan wants to encourage more “foreign students” to “come to the United States and get the jobs that should be available to American STEM students.”
This has sparked fierce debate within MAGA over the H-1B visa, which grants temporary legal status to high-skilled immigrants in general and highly educated immigrant workers employed by U.S. companies in particular. The tech right, led by Elon Musk, has argued that it is in America’s national interest to ensure that Silicon Valley has access to the best global talent, much to the chagrin of Loomer, Steve Bannon and other ultranationalist Trump supporters.
In this debate, both factions gravitated toward the ugliest possible arguments for their respective positions. The H-1B visa system can be reasonably criticized for plausibly reducing wages and employment opportunities for domestically born technical professionals. But Loomer preferred to claim that the program would allow “Third World invaders from India” to steal the American dream from “white Europeans.”
Meanwhile, prominent “populist” Vivek Ramaswamy has advocated for high-skilled immigration on the grounds that American tech companies need access to foreign labor because the American working class is culturally underprivileged.
In other words, while portraying most of their compatriots as untalented and lazy, Musk and company have expressed praiseworthy sentiments. The Tesla CEO told . Anyone who works hard, is honest, and loves America.” Musk also implied that such immigration opponents actually “want America to be defeated for their own personal gain.” Trump has expressed sympathy for Musk’s views both in his remarks to Truth Social and to the press.
Trump and Musk are right to suggest that increasing legal immigration is in America’s national interest. But their concept of worthwhile immigration is too narrow.
Both demonized less-educated and lower-income immigrants, including some who came to the United States legally, while arguing that the United States especially needed highly skilled and top-talented immigrants. But an immigration policy that truly puts “America First” would allow more of these “low-skilled” workers into the United States.
First, technologically and entrepreneurially gifted immigrants are not always easy to identify before they arrive in the United States. Throughout American history, immigrant families have had higher rates of upward mobility than native-born families. Many low-income immigrants advance to highly skilled positions. In fact, some of America’s tech giants, such as WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, have come from such humble origins.
But more importantly, the United States is a rapidly aging nation that must accommodate steadily increasing numbers of immigrants to avoid population decline and the numerous economic problems that come with it. If America needs more older workers to design software or train AI, we also need them to care for the elderly, build homes, harvest crops, and perform countless other unglamorous but essential tasks.
If Trump wants to maximize the long-term prosperity of existing American citizens, he will open “big beautiful doors” to workers with diverse skills.
An aging America needs more people
America is getting older. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of Americans aged 65 and older increased by nearly 40%. As a result, the elderly population will reach an all-time high of 17.3% of the U.S. population in 2022.
This presents a major and long-term challenge for the United States. The elderly population is one that needs more healthcare services. And if the ratio of retired to working-age Americans steadily increases, it will become more difficult for the economy to adequately provide such health care. This means the United States must provide more health care with a smaller workforce.
Likewise, if the share of Americans receiving Social Security benefits increases and the share paying into the program decreases, it will become increasingly difficult to finance old age pensions for the nation’s seniors.
Meanwhile, if current demographic trends continue unabated, deaths will outpace births and the overall population will decline by the end of the century. And population decline is associated with lower economic growth and productivity.
The United States is far from alone in facing these demographic challenges. Many countries have tried to increase their populations through a variety of pronatalist policies, including providing generous social welfare benefits to parents, but none have had much of an impact. The only policy that will reliably and substantially slow population decline is to expand immigration. America’s moderate prosperity therefore depends on its ability to attract more older workers.
The Census Bureau’s 2023 projections make this reality clear. The organization examined what would happen to the U.S. population over the next several decades under various immigration policy scenarios. If the United States stopped all immigration, the U.S. population in 2100 would decline by 32.2% compared to 2022. In contrast, in a “high immigration” scenario, the population would be 30.6% larger.
Immigration has also significantly improved the demographic structure of the United States, the bureau’s modeling shows. Without immigration, more than 35% of Americans would be over 65 by 2100. In a high-immigration scenario, that figure is only 27.4%.
Even in the short term, immigration levels will have a major impact on the demographic health of the country. Without immigration, America’s primary workforce would decline by 5% between 2022 and 2035. Higher levels of immigration would increase the labor force by 5% over the same period.
All this means that America needs more workers in the prime of their lives. It seems unlikely that the United States will be able to sufficiently satisfy its economy’s need for young workers with talented foreign engineers alone.
And anyway, America needs more workers with less rare skills. The United States is struggling with a labor shortage in health care jobs that require only a high school diploma, such as home health aides and pharmacy technicians. By 2040, the country is expected to have 355,000 fewer direct caregivers than its economy needs, according to an analysis by the Niskanen Center. Immigrants are much more likely than other Americans to be willing to perform the difficult and unglamorous tasks required for home care. Foreign-born Americans make up about 14% of the overall population but make up 27.7% of the medical assistant workforce. To the American Immigration Council.
Immigrants are equally integral to alleviating labor shortages in construction, among other important industries.
To be sure, large influxes of foreign-born workers may reduce, at least temporarily, the bargaining power of native-born workers in certain sectors. But overall, research consistently shows that immigrants, even for short periods of time, do not reduce the wages or job opportunities of native-born workers. Meanwhile, over the long term, increased immigration is essential to sustaining America’s economic growth, providing higher wages and more generous benefits to native workers.
Of course, in a world where birth rates are falling almost everywhere, immigration is not a permanent solution to population decline. But the longer the United States delays population decline, the more technologically advanced it will be when it ultimately faces it. Perhaps it will be a little easier to deal with a rapidly shrinking older workforce in a world of superintelligent AI and cheap, nimble robots than it is in our current reality.
Don’t let Trump put America first.
It’s unclear what impact Trump’s holiday-season foray into globalism will have on policy. If the president-elect puts his national agenda in Musk’s mouth, it will likely go beyond easing some restrictions on H-1B visas. By all accounts, the incoming administration is paying far more attention to the labor needs of the Silicon Valley oligarchy than to the labor needs of the U.S. economy as a whole.
Those who are truly interested in ensuring America’s long-term prosperity must recognize that there is more than one type of immigrant that is desirable. Although some right-wing populists suggest otherwise, you don’t need a college degree to do the essential work.
