Increasing skilled immigration is a mistake
A plea to the tech-right
Written by Arctotherium.
When asked, 71% of Trump supporters want to increase high-skilled immigration to the United States. This isn’t a priority for most of Trump’s coalition, but one wealthy and disproportionately influential faction has consistently and publicly advocated for increasing high-skilled immigration, to the point that Trump himself has endorsed giving green cards to all foreign students. This faction is the libertarian-adjacent tech-right, whose support for Trump is motivated by concerns about regulations, freedom of speech and averting California-style political dysfunction in the rest of the country. They are making a fatal mistake.
The case for high-skilled immigration is simple. National IQ is the best predictor of economic growth and development, explaining roughly 70% of the variance in GDP per capita by itself.1 Combine this with the allocative benefits underlying mainstream economists’ support for immigration2 and the innovative benefits of getting more smart people into cognitive clusters like San Francisco, and the argument for admitting high-skilled immigration is strong. But it is wrong. Skilled immigrants are not just labor and innovation machines. They, and their children, are influential political and cultural actors whose effect in those domains is to undermine the things that make America exceptional.
The tech-right appreciates some of America’s virtues, particularly our economic dynamism and freedom of speech, often contrasting the United States favorably with the rest of the Anglosphere or with Europe. They are right to do so: America is exceptional.
Economics
National IQ may explain most of the variance in wealth between countries (with a history of Communism and large resource endowments accounting for most of the remainder), but the relationship breaks down at the high end. Among rich countries without large resource rents or a history of Communism, the United States stands out as being much wealthier than IQ alone would predict. Meanwhile, the non-US Anglosphere (United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) underperforms, being poorer than both the United States and north west Europe. The gap between the Anglosphere and the United States is even starker if you look at productivity rather than GDP per capita.3
The comparison with the non-US Anglosphere is particularly instructive because these countries are very similar to the United States culturally, genetically and institutionally. Britain, Australia, and Canada have all grown more slowly than the United States since the 2008 financial crisis.
And all three have embraced a policy of enormous amounts (far more, per capita, than the United States) of skilled, legal immigration, particularly from China and South Asia. All three have seen relatively stagnant personal incomes, and skyrocketing housing prices. One might object on the grounds that immigration to Canada, Australia, and Britain isn’t really skilled, but this is what “skilled immigration” looks like when refracted through government bureaucracies. We should treat these countries as a cautionary tale; we could very easily end up in their shoes.
Freedom of speech
American speech is the freest in the world, a fact recognized by much of the tech-right. A comparison to our Anglosphere cousins is instructive. The United States is not jailing tens of thousands of people or sending police door-to-door for political speech as the United Kingdom is. We are not calling on speech to be regulated as a weapon of war, as the former Prime Minister of New Zealand did in 2023. We do not have Canada’s hate speech laws4 or widespread government subsidies of pro-government media outlets. American scientists are not prohibited by the government from communicating their results to the public, as in Australia. We can be proud of our strongly pro-free speech legal environment.
But we can’t rest easy. America’s free speech maximalism comes from Supreme Court decisions based on the First Amendment. And the Constitution does not enforce itself.5 The Soviet Union infamously had constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech; without a strong pro-free speech elite culture the letter of the law is meaningless. All it takes is the wrong judicial appointment from a pro-censorship Democratic Party and it could be removed. And when the bureaucracy and tech company workers are in alignment, the government can and has worked with those companies to censor without tripping legal safeguards. It’s no surprise that, despite the First Amendment, nearly half of Americans do not feel free to speak our minds. Maintaining American freedom of speech requires that tech workers, judges, lawyers and bureaucrats broadly support it. If the composition of those groups changes dramatically, support could evaporate. Right now, the United States has one of the most pro-freedom-of-speech populations in the world.6 But change Americans and you will change America.
Disaggregating “skilled immigrants”
Just as “immigrants” can be usefully decomposed into skilled and unskilled, “skilled immigrants” conceals an important divide. Using innovation as a proxy for skill, we can reasonably divide skilled immigration to the United States into two groups: white and Asian.7 Excluding the “other” category for lack of information, we can estimate that European immigrants make up 12% of US immigrants, but 39% of US immigrant innovators. Meanwhile, Asian immigrants make up 31% of non-other US immigrants and 56% of non-other US immigrant innovators. Combined, these two groups make up 43% of non-other US immigration and 95% of non-other US immigrant innovators. Skilled immigration from elsewhere is a rounding error.
Of the two groups, Europeans are more likely to be innovators. They are 8.2 times more represented among innovators than among the US population, versus 4.5 times for Asians. Yet both groups are very overrepresented among inventors and account for a sizeable chunk of American innovation. This makes sense; immigration from both places is highly selective.8 With that said, there’s significant regression to the mean. Among the US-born, Asians are actually underrepresented among innovators, while white, native-born Americans are almost exactly in line with the national average.
As a rule, European immigrants are more accomplished than their Asian counterparts, as are their kids, though both groups make significant contributions.9 However, neither skilled immigrants nor their children confine themselves to laboratories. They become professors, activists, lawyers, judges, politicians, bureaucrats and journalists. In other words, they get involved in politics. Unlike economics or innovation, which is positive-sum, politics is zero-sum. More influence for group A means less for group not-A. And unless stopped, an Asian elite will undermine what makes America exceptional. Let’s consider the politics of Asian-Americans.
Economics
Asian-Americans are an extremely left-wing group, so much so that despite their economic success, Asians are much more pro-government-intervention than whites, and are closer to blacks or Hispanics (who have much more to gain from redistribution).10 For instance, a supermajority of Asians (66%) believe that the government should do more to solve problems, compared to only 44% of whites. Similarly, a supermajority (70%) of Asians say government regulation is necessary to protect the public interest, compared to only 53% of whites.
And when asked explicitly, Asians are much more pro-socialist. 49% have a positive impression of socialism, compared to only 31% of whites.
Boosters of Asian immigration might note that Asians are still slightly more supportive of capitalism than socialism, but what matters is the difference from the status quo. The balance of power among the American elite determines the current equilibrium between a market economy and state intervention. Mass immigration of an elite group 20+ points more favorable to state intervention than the people with whom they are competing will shift things in an interventionist direction. The tech-right is rightfully concerned with creeping regulationism and socialism. They should take heed.
Freedom of speech
Americans, as a group, are very pro-freedom-of-speech by world standards. But there is considerable variation among ethnicities. Descendants of northwest Europeans are, broadly speaking, the most pro-freedom-of-speech, while Asian groups are much less so.
The tech-right is rightfully dismissive of “misinformation studies” for being an exercise in the redefinition of truth along partisan lines. But not everyone shares their views. When asked about protecting press freedom vs curbing false information, Asians are 12 points more likely than whites to favor censorship.
It’s impossible to know for sure, but given this difference, there is probably a connection between increased Asian dominance of tech companies and the shift we have seen from a broadly libertarian ethos of freedom-of-speech to one more favourable to censorship.
Affirmative action
The tech-right rightfully despises Affirmative Action/DEI as an anti-meritocratic, institution-wrecking racial spoils system. It may surprise those familiar with the case of Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard to know that Asians support Affirmative Action by large margins.
The resolution to this seeming contradiction is that Asians oppose Affirmative Action in college admissions, where it hurts them, but support it in other areas, like government or corporate hiring and promotion and above all taxpayer-subsidized low-interest Small Business Administration loans, where it benefits them. There is no universal principle involved. (A tech company founded in Indian and headquartered in the US was recently found guilty of discriminating against non-Indians.)
Views on America
We only have one America. If you value America’s unique freedom and economic and technological development and dynamism, the wellbeing of the country is paramount. There is no second America to flee to. Hence the American elite must be patriotic, must acknowledge America’s virtues, seek to maintain and improve them, and have a stake in the country.11
As it happens, Asians feel the least positive about America of any racial group. Asians are least likely to believe that America is better than most other countries, to feel proud or grateful to be American, to feel that life in the United States is better than in the rest of the world, or to feel attached to the United States. I initially found this counterintuitive, since Asian-Americans are majority foreign-born, and so personally moved to America because it was better than their home country. But it’s true. For engineers, workers and scientists, this is fine. However, it’s not the profile of a group you want running your institutions.
Change over time
This might be acceptable if it were a transient phase that faded as Asians accustomed themselves to the United States. Unfortunately, the reverse is true. Asian-Americans appear to de-assimilate over time. Or rather, Asians assimilate to the leftist, anti-American norms12 of Asian-Americans.13
Conclusion
“The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”
—Enoch Powell
Skilled immigrants and their children will, through participation in the political process, form a disproportionately influential elite.14 In the current system, skilled immigrants are majority Asian, and if the results of similar experiments in the rest of the Anglosphere are any guide, additional skilled immigrants will be even more Asian. Compared to whites, Asians are more pro-regulation, pro-socialism, pro-Affirmative Action, and less pro-freedom of speech. The predictable effect of ramping up skilled immigration will therefore be to shift the US elite, and thus the country, even more in the direction of regulationism, DEI and censorship.
You can have capitalism, meritocracy, freedom-of-speech and patriotism, or you can have enormous amounts of legal, skilled immigration. But you cannot have both, not under an immigration system remotely similar to the existing one.15 To support increasing skilled immigration while viewing leftism as a civilization-wrecking scourge, as Elon Musk and many others in the tech-right do, is shooting yourself in the foot.16 Rather than lobby to expand skilled immigration, the tech-right should either join immigration restrictionists, or work to create a different skilled immigration system that does not lead to a dramatic shift in the composition of American elites.17
Arctotherium is an anonymous writer interested in demographics and the future of civilization. You can find more of his writings at his blog Not With A Bang or at his Twitter.
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If you’re not familiar with this, or don’t believe that causality goes from intelligence to development rather than the other way around, I recommend reading Cognitive Capitalism, ‘National Intelligence Really Is the Best Predictor of Economic Growth’, and Garrett Jones’ book Hive Mind, in that order.
Which in practice do not exist for low-IQ immigration, for the reasons underlined in the linked texts on national IQ and economic development. People are not labor machines; genetics, culture, politics, and (slowly-growing) capital and land per person all matter.
In my opinion, GDP per capita is the more relevant metric for this article, because throughput isn’t free. Continental Europe is close to the US on productivity, but doing more with more, as the United States does, is impressive and noteworthy, especially for the tech-right, which is full of hard working people who want to accomplish great things.
To give you an idea of the Overton Window for freedom of speech Up North, the government of Canada recently attempted to amend these laws so that a judge could order house arrest on suspicion that you would commit hate speech in the future.
Those wishing to rely on Constitutional protections alone should recall that nearly half of their countrymen do not view the document as sacrosanct. Per Cato:
A significant minority (44%) of Americans would be open to "writing a new American constitution to reflect our diversity as a people," while 56% would oppose writing a new constitution. This builds upon the work of political scientist Eric Kaufmann who found a similar pattern of results.
Democrats stand out with 63% who favor writing a new constitution, compared to 16% of Republicans and 37% of independents. A majority (54%) of Americans under 30 also favor designing a new constitution. However, support drops among older cohorts including among those aged 30-44 (47%), 45-54 (40%), 55-64 (27%), and 65 and above (25%). Black Americans (73%) and Asian Americans (60%) also support designing a new constitution. In contrast, majorities of Hispanic Americans (56%) and White Americans (68%) oppose designing a new constitution.
Given how difficult amending or abolishing the Constitution is, this doesn’t mean the text itself will be altered. But people who want to get rid of the Constitution will not interpret the text as intended or written; reinterpreting the Constitution into requiring the ideological cause du jour is something that’s happened many times.
This has the partisan, racial and sex loadings you’d expect. Whites, men, and Republicans are more pro-freedom-of-speech. White Americans are probably the most pro-freedom-of-speech ethnic group in the world by a significant margin.
Other proxies, like education, are bad because foreign degree holders are not as capable as American degree holders. Immigrants with foreign post-secondary degrees are less literate and worse with computers than the median native-born American, and only barely more numerate. Given how low the median American is, that’s very bad. And this doesn’t disaggregate by race; native-born whites would be much higher.
I can’t emphasize enough that increasing immigration will reduce selectivity. That Asian immigration is selective is not a fact of nature: massively expanding it will, with certainty, make it less so.
Another example. Two-thirds of US Nobel Prizes in 2023 were won by immigrants. All of them were European.
It should go without saying, but I’ll include the disclaimer that group-level statements don’t necessarily apply to individuals. However, the immigration bureaucracy can’t possibly evaluate all the individual details of each applicant; group-level characteristics are what’s relevant to policy.
Because without knowing that America is better than other countries in specific ways and for specific reasons, you can’t keep it that way.
It’s not just politics. Asians have the lowest extra-marital rates of any race in the United States, but this is only because foreign-born Asians have children in wedlock. American-born Asians have kids outside of marriage at about the same rate as whites.
A fun alternative way to view this is to look at those surnames for which partisanship correlates most strongly with age (i.e., those for which the difference in support for Democrats versus Republicans between young and old people with the names is largest). As it turns out, these are all Vietnamese surnames; first-gen Vietnamese refugees fleeing Communism are fairly right-wing, but their kids are extremely left-wing Asian-Americans.
To get an idea of how fast this is happening, the incoming Harvard class is 37% Asian. Unless we change course, that’s a pretty good estimate for what the US elite will look like in 20 years, up from near zero at the start of the century. And it will keep going up.
An explicitly race-based system that only allowed in skilled whites. or a labor visa system which allowed people in but did not grant them or their descendants citizenship or the opportunity to participate in the political process, would not have the same problems. But neither is in the cards.
A common argument among the AI-aware (which includes much of the tech-right) is that the United States should massively ramp up skilled immigration (of AI researchers) from China to "win the AGI race". Most of the arguments in this article don't apply here. If you (1) believe that the Singularity is imminent and (2) strongly prefer it begin in the United States over China, it makes sense not to care about the long-term societal outcomes (it takes a few years for immigrants to become politically relevant, by which point human history will have ended one way or another). But this argument is still wrong on its own terms.
To the extent that the US-China AGI race is even real (the low price of cutting-edge GPUs in China, despite supply disruptions thanks to US export controls, suggests demand is low, which would imply that all serious hyperscalers are American), the US advantage is in algorithms and ideas. The Chinese advantage is in actual industrial production; China can build out its data centers and electricity supply several times faster than the US can. The obvious Chinese path to victory is to steal American algorithms or model weights, then out-build us in the physical world. And exploiting Chinese researchers in important American labs is by far the easiest way for the PRC to do this. (For reasons that should be obvious: not only is there national loyalty, but Chinese thieves have the option of returning to China, guaranteeing physical safety and the opportunity to get rich using American secrets in the enormous Chinese market. Non-Chinese can't do this.) China has successfully stolen American secrets to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars across dozens of industries, overwhelmingly through the Chinese diaspora. It’s wishful thinking to expect AI to be different, and ramping up Chinese AI researcher immigration makes this attack surface much wider. There's sometimes a bad analogy made with heavily-Jewish scientific refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. This group had strong ideological reasons to hate the Nazis and thus were not a serious espionage risk with respect to Germany. This is not the case for Chinese immigration to the US, which is mostly economically driven.
Any plan to use Chinese immigration to help America technically compete with China (not just in AI) is doomed.
Aside from explicit racial restrictions, 1924-style ethnic quotas or a guest worker program, one possible route would be to index a country’s immigration quota to its GDP per capita. This would naturally favor skilled immigration from Europe, which is already better (more innovative and entrepreneurial) than its Asian equivalent.
This is a very interesting article that makes a large number of very good points, but in the end, I disagree with your conclusions. I also learned a great deal about the political beliefs of Americans of Asian ancestry. They seem to have income and political beliefs that roughly track Jewish Americans.
I do not consider myself a member of the "Tech Right" although I agree with them on many issues and did work for 20 years in the Digital Technology sector. Moreover, I recently wrote an article advocating for a combination of:
1) A complete overhaul of American immigration policy that exclusively allows in highly-skilled workers who can make the greatest contributions to the nation. This means eliminating virtually all other types of legal immigration.
2) Strict enforcement against illegal immigrants both at the border and internally.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/we-need-a-skills-based-immigration
One of my major criticisms of the Right (both tech and HBD) is that it does not put enough emphasis on promoting long-term economic growth and upward mobility for the working class. I largely agree with the Right in their cultural opposition to the Left particularly the Woke, but those are not the only issues that matter.
I believe that a skill-based immigration policy is important to promoting economic growth and I am willing to take the chance that an increased number of highly-skilled immigrants from Asia will push the educated classes further to the Left. Either way, we have a fight coming for the political allegiance of the college-educated.
I do not see a zero-immigration policy or anything close to it as politically viable. Even if it were implemented, it would be a short-term fix that would likely revert back to the current situation in later years.
We are either going to have mass immigration of low-skilled workers or mass immigration of high-skilled workers. I think the American people will prefer the latter, and it would be far better for long-term economic and demographic growth.
I came to the same conclusion, though I had a very different attitude twenty years ago and used to have a very high opinion of East Asians who I was surrounded by in high school.
First, once they get through the fresh off the boat stage, Asians become very progressive. I've watched it happen to many close friends, regardless of underlying personality type.
Second, Asians tend to be much more nepotistic. I'm surrounded by Indian government contractors in NOVA and the local hospital chain is dominated by Indians. They hire each other and are ruthless about it. As noted, the objection to affirmative action is entirely self interested, they support racial set asides for themselves just not anyone else.
They also tend not to care about the work result. Not that they don't try to perform, but it's not the primary goal. If you follow the process as process and it doesn't work and you get paid, that is all the matters. This is especially toxic when the government is the payer or you have to deal with them as medical providers.
The attitude towards authority, education, and safetyism are very left wing. They all went INSANE during COVID. And the local school district has flipped blue due to their presence and pushes DEI, trans, and just voted for collective bargaining.
On a "GDP" basis I'm supposed to be enamored to live in one of the richests areas in the world, and all these Indians are "adding to GDP". But mostly I hate the effects they have on the local politics and culture, think a lot of the work they do is just government scams they hire each other for, and have been very disappointed with their services as medical providers.
My final observation is that I think East Asians are less of a problem than others groups. East Asians have some of the same issues but are very politically and socially passive and not as nakedly corrupt.
My stance is that there is still way to much top 1% talent in Asia to not try and aggressively recruit it, but I would set the bar high. I'm not particularly interested in bringing in mediocre tier Asians en mass.