On New Year’s Eve, America’s most prominent nativist declared that the nation needs more immigrants.
“We need competent people, we need smart people coming into our country,” President-elect Donald Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, “we need a lot of people coming in.”
It may sound as though Trump was just visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. But it was actually extremely online white nationalists who triggered the president-elect’s rhetorical shift on immigration.
On December 22, Trump named the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as a senior adviser for artificial intelligence. The racist provocateur — and Trump insider — Laura Loomer condemned Krishnan’s selection because the Indian-American investor had recently called for increasing skilled immigration. In Loomer’s telling, Krishnan wants to let more “foreign students” come “to the US and take jobs that should be given to American STEM students.”
This sparked a bitter intra-MAGA debate over high-skill immigration in general, and the H-1B visa — which gives temporary legal status to highly educated immigrant workers employed by American companies — in particular. The tech right, led by Elon Musk, insisted that ensuring Silicon Valley’s access to top global talent was in America’s national interest, much to the chagrin of Loomer, Steve Bannon, and other ultranationalist Trump supporters.
Both factions in this debate gravitated toward the ugliest possible arguments for their respective positions. One can make reasonable criticisms of the H-1B visa system, which plausibly reduces wages and employment opportunities for native-born tech professionals. But Loomer preferred to argue that the program enables “third world invaders from India” to steal the American dream from “white Europeans.”
Renowned “populist” Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile, defended high-skill immigration on the grounds that US tech firms need access to foreign labor because working-class Americans are culturally deficient.
This said, in between portraying most of their countrymen as untalented and lazy, Musk and company voiced some laudable sentiments. The Tesla CEO posted on X that “Anyone – of any race, creed or nationality – who came to America and worked like hell to contribute to this country will forever have my respect,” and reiterated his belief that “We should greatly increase legal immigration of anyone who is hard-working, honest and loves America.” Musk further implied that opponents of such immigration effectively “want America to lose for their own personal gain.” Trump proceeded to signal sympathy with Musk’s perspective, both on Truth Social and in remarks to the press.
Trump and Musk are right to suggest that increasing legal immigration is in America’s national interest. But their conception of worthwhile immigration is much too narrow.
Both have argued that America specifically needs highly skilled and superlatively talented immigrants while demonizing less educated and lower-income migrants, including some who came to the United States legally. Yet an immigration policy that truly put “America first” would also allow more of these “low-skill” workers into the country.
For one thing, the most technically and entrepreneurially gifted immigrants are not always easy to identify before they’ve arrived in the United States: Throughout US history, immigrant families have had higher rates of upward mobility than native-born ones, such that the children of low-income migrants often ascend to high-skill positions. Indeed, some of the nation’s tech titans, such as WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, came from such humble origins.
More importantly, though, the United States is a rapidly aging country that will need to welcome a steadily increasing number of immigrants in order to avert population decline and the myriad economic problems that attend it. If America needs more prime-age workers to design its software or train its AI, it also needs them to care for its elderly, build its houses, pick its crops, and perform countless other unglamorous but essential tasks.
If Trump wishes to maximize the long-term prosperity of existing American citizens, he will open his “big beautiful door” to workers with a wide variety of skill sets.
A graying America needs more people
The United States is getting old. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of Americans 65 years or older increased by nearly 40 percent. As a result, seniors comprised a record-high 17.3 percent of the US population in 2022.
This presents America with large, long-term challenges. An older population is one that requires more medical services. And it will be more difficult for the economy to adequately provide such health care if the ratio of retirees to working-age Americans steadily rises: This means the US will need to provide more medical care with a smaller labor force.
Similarly, if the share of Americans collecting Social Security benefits rises — while the share paying into the program declines — it will become more and more difficult to finance old-age pensions for the nation’s seniors.
Meanwhile, if current demographic trends continue unabated, the overall population will decline by century’s end as deaths outpace births. And population reductions are associated with lower economic growth and productivity.
America is far from alone in facing these demographic challenges. Although many nations have sought to increase their populations through various pro-natalist policies — including the provision of generous social welfare benefits for parents — none have had much of an impact. The only policy that reliably and substantially slows population decline is expanding immigration. To no small extent, the medium-prosperity of the United States therefore hinges on its capacity to bring in more prime-age workers.
The Census Bureau’s 2023 projections make this reality plain. The agency examined what would happen to the US population in the coming decades in different immigration policy scenarios. It found that if the United States were to end all immigration, the US population would be 32.2 percent smaller in 2100 than it had been in 2022. Under a “high immigration” scenario, by contrast, the population would be 30.6 percent larger.
Immigration also greatly improved America’s demographic structure in the bureau’s modeling. Absent immigration, more than 35 percent of Americans would be over 65 years old by 2100; in the high-immigration scenario, that figure is just 27.4 percent.
Even in the near term, immigration levels will have a profound impact on the nation’s demographic health. Without immigration, America’s prime-age labor force would drop by 5 percent between 2022 and 2035. With high levels of immigration, that labor force would grow by 5 percent over the same period.
All this means that America needs more workers in the prime years of their lives. It is unlikely that the United States could fully sate its economy’s appetite for younger laborers with gifted foreign engineers alone.
And in any case, the US specifically needs many more workers with less rarified skill sets. America is suffering from a shortage of laborers in health care occupations that require only a high school diploma, such as home health care aides and pharmacy technicians. By 2040, the country is on track to have 355,000 fewer direct care workers than the economy will demand, according to an analysis from the Niskanen Center. Immigrants are much more likely than other Americans to be willing to perform the difficult and unglamorous tasks that home care requires: While foreign-born Americans account for roughly 14 percent of the overall population, they comprise 27.7 percent of the health aide labor force, according to the American Immigration Council.
Immigrants are similarly indispensable to mitigating labor shortages in construction, among other vital industries.
To be sure, it is possible for very large influxes of foreign-born laborers to reduce the bargaining power of native-born workers in certain sectors, at least temporarily. But in the aggregate, studies have consistently found that immigrants do not reduce wages or job opportunities for native-born workers, even in the short term. In the long run, meanwhile, increasing immigration is indispensable for sustaining America’s economic growth — and thus, delivering wage gains and generous entitlement benefits to native-born workers.
Of course, in a world where fertility rates are falling almost everywhere, immigration is not a permanent solution to demographic decline. But the longer America can delay its population’s contraction, the more technologically advanced it will be when it ultimately confronts it. Presumably, it will be a bit easier to deal with a rapidly shrinking prime-age labor force in a world of superintelligent AI and cheap, highly dexterous robots than in our present reality.
Don’t count on Trump to put America first
It’s far from clear whether Trump’s holiday season foray into cosmopolitanism will have any policy implications at all. If the president-elect puts his governing agenda where Musk’s mouth is, this will likely amount to little more than a relaxation of some restrictions on H-1B visas. By all appearances, the incoming administration is far more attentive to the labor needs of Silicon Valley oligarchs than to those of the American economy writ large.
Those who are genuinely interested in ensuring America’s long-term prosperity must recognize that there is more than one type of desirable immigrant. Although some right-wing populists suggest otherwise, you don’t need a college degree to perform indispensable work.
