Donald Trump and Elon Musk made a good point on immigration

On New Year's Eve, America's most prominent nativist said the nation needs more immigrants.

We need good people, we need smart people coming to our country, President-elect Donald Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday.

You might think that Trump has just been visited by the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future. But it was actually extremely online white nationalists who sparked the president-elect's shift in rhetoric on immigration.

On December 22, Trump named venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as senior advisor on artificial intelligence. Racist provocateur and Trump insider Laura Loomer condemned Krishnan's choice because the Indian-American investor had recently called for increased skilled immigration. According to Loomers, Krishnan wants to allow more foreign students to come to the United States and take jobs that should go to American STEM students.

This sparked a bitter debate within MAGA over high-skilled immigration in general, and the H-1B visa that grants temporary legal status to high-skilled immigrant workers employed by U.S. companies in particular. The tech right, led by Elon Musk, insisted that ensuring Silicon Valley's access to the world's top talent was in America's national interest, much to the chagrin of Loomer, Steve Bannon and others ultranationalist supporters of Trump.

Both factions in this debate were drawn to the ugliest possible arguments to defend their respective positions. There are reasonable criticisms that can be leveled at the H-1B visa system, which plausibly reduces wages and job opportunities for native-born tech professionals. But Loomer preferred to assert that the program allows Third World invaders from India to steal the American dream from white Europeans.

Famed populist Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile, has defended high-skilled immigration by arguing that U.S. tech companies need access to foreign labor because working-class Americans are culturally deficient.

That said, while describing most of their compatriots as talentless and lazy, Musk and company expressed commendable sentiments. The Tesla CEO posted on should significantly increase legal immigration of all difficult people. -hardworking, honest and loves America. Musk further implied that opponents of such immigration actually wanted America to lose for their own personal gain. Trump later expressed sympathy for Musk's views, both on Truth Social and in remarks to the press.

Trump and Musk are correct in suggesting that increasing legal immigration is in America's national interest. But their concept of valid immigration is far too narrow.

Both argued that America specifically needs highly skilled and extremely talented immigrants, while demonizing less educated and lower-income migrants, including some who arrived in the United States legally. Yet an immigration policy that truly puts America first would also allow more of these low-skilled workers to enter the country.

On the one hand, the most technically and entrepreneurially gifted immigrants are not always easy to identify before their arrival in the United States: throughout the history of the United States, immigrant families have had higher rates of upward mobility than those born in the country, so children from low-income families often move into high-skilled positions. Indeed, some of the country's tech titans, like WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, come from such humble origins.

But more importantly, the United States is a rapidly aging country that will need to accommodate ever-increasing numbers of immigrants in order to avoid population decline and the myriad of economic problems that accompany it. If America needs more mature workers to design its software or train its AI, it also needs them to care for its elderly, build its homes, harvest its crops, and accomplish countless tasks. other unglamorous but essential tasks.

If Trump wants to maximize the long-term prosperity of existing American citizens, he will open his big, beautiful door to workers with a wide variety of skills.

An aging America needs more people

The United States is aging. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of Americans aged 65 or older increased by nearly 40%. As a result, older adults made up a record 17.3% of the U.S. population in 2022.

This poses great long-term challenges for America. An older population requires more medical services. And it will be more difficult for the economy to provide such health care adequately if the ratio of retirees to working-age Americans steadily increases: that means the United States will have to provide more health care with a reduced labor force.

Likewise, if the share of Americans receiving Social Security benefits increases while the share of those paying into the program declines, it will become increasingly difficult to finance old-age pensions for the nation's elderly.

Meanwhile, if current demographic trends continue unabated, the overall population will decline by the end of the centuries, with deaths outpacing births. And population reductions are associated with lower economic growth and productivity.

America is far from alone in the face of these demographic challenges. Although many countries have sought to increase their populations through various pronatalist policies, including providing generous welfare benefits to parents, none have had a great impact. The only policy that reliably and substantially slows population decline is increased immigration. To a large extent, then, the average prosperity of the United States depends on its ability to attract more prime-age workers.

The Census Bureau's projections for 2023 clearly show this reality. The agency examined what would happen to the American population in the coming decades under different immigration policy scenarios. According to this study, if the United States ended all immigration, the U.S. population would be 32.2% smaller in 2100 than it was in 2022. In contrast, in a high immigration scenario, the population would be 30.6% more important.

Immigration has also greatly improved the demographic structure of the Americas in office modeling. Without immigration, more than 35 percent of Americans would be over 65 by 2100; in the high immigration scenario, this figure is only 27.4 percent.

Even in the short term, immigration levels will have a profound impact on the demographic health of the country. Without immigration, the prime-age U.S. workforce would decline by 5% between 2022 and 2035. With high levels of immigration, this workforce would increase by 5% over the same period.

All of this means that America needs more workers in the prime years of their lives. It is unlikely that the United States alone can satisfy its economy's appetite for a younger workforce and talented foreign engineers.

And regardless, the United States particularly needs many more workers with less rarefied skills. America suffers from a labor shortage in health care professions that only require a high school diploma, such as home health aides and pharmacy technicians. By 2040, the country is on track to have 355,000 fewer direct care workers than the economy demands, according to an analysis by the Niskanen Center. Immigrants are much more likely than other Americans to be willing to do the difficult, unglamorous tasks that home care requires: While foreign-born Americans make up about 14 percent of the overall population, they make up 27.7 percent of the caregiver workforce, according to the American Immigration Council.

Immigrants are also critical to easing labor shortages in construction, among other vital sectors.

Certainly, it is possible that a very large influx of foreign-born workers could reduce, at least temporarily, the bargaining power of native-born workers in some sectors. But overall, studies have consistently shown that immigrants do not reduce wages or job opportunities for native-born workers, even in the short term. In the long term, however, increasing immigration is essential to sustain economic growth in the Americas and thus enable wage gains and generous social benefits for native-born workers.

Of course, in a world where fertility rates are declining almost everywhere, immigration is not a permanent solution to population decline. But the longer America can delay its population contraction, the more technologically advanced it will be when it faces it. Presumably, it will be somewhat easier to cope with a rapidly shrinking middle-aged workforce in a world of superintelligent AI and cheap, highly dexterous robots than in our current reality.

Don't count on Trump to put America first

It's far from clear whether Trump's foray into cosmopolitanism this holiday season will have political implications. If the president-elect puts his governing agenda where Musk's mouth is, it will likely amount to little more than a loosening of some restrictions on H-1B visas. Clearly, the new administration is far more attentive to the labor needs of Silicon Valley oligarchs than to those of the U.S. economy as a whole.

Those who truly wish to ensure the long-term prosperity of the Americas must recognize that there are many types of desirable immigrants. Although some right-wing populists suggest otherwise, you don't need a college degree to do essential work.

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