High-Skilled Immigration Is Key to America’s Success

Top human capital is hard to come by.

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.

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Even if you look at rates of entrepreneurship more generally instead of focusing on the most successful firms, we see how dependent the American economy is on recent arrivals. Immigrants are nearly twice as likely to start businesses as native-born Americans, and they make up about a quarter of all entrepreneurs. These figures highlight how immigration fuels not only population growth but also innovation, job creation, and long-term economic dynamism. And this isn’t simply a question of deliberately skimming off a few geniuses born overseas, even if it were possible for the government to be that discerning in its assessment of talent. The goal should instead be to have as large a pool as possible of skilled individuals who can contribute to dynamism and growth at all levels.

Innovation is driven not just by increasing private-sector productivity but also by breakthroughs made on university campuses. In 2019 and 2020, 49 percent of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) master’s degrees and 57 percent of STEM PhDs were obtained by students on temporary visas. As of the 2023–2024 academic year, over 500,000 international graduate students were pursuing advanced education in the US, with roughly 70 percent of full‑time graduate students in fields like electrical engineering and computer science hailing from abroad.

Members of the tech right who have either worked in the Trump administration or supported it are themselves proof of the United States’ ability to attract the most talented and ambitious people in the world. Elon Musk was born in South Africa, and Thiel is from Germany. Other examples include David Sacks, born in South Africa, who is now Trump’s AI and crypto czar, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a Sri Lankan–born investor who helped scale Facebook and is now a major Republican donor. Note that Musk would not have been able to immigrate to the US if our policy were to accept proven geniuses only. He accomplished his remarkable feats after he arrived in the United States. The same can be said of Taiwan-born Jensen Huang, who came to America as a child, and ended up founding Nvidia, which has a market capitalization of over $4 trillion.

Yet despite what members of the tech right may think about the issue of immigration, the Trump administration has been making it much more difficult for smart and talented people to arrive and settle in the United States. One major area of anti-immigrant crackdown has been international students. In early 2025, a Japanese graduate student at Brigham Young University faced deportation proceedings after being cited for a fishing violation—an example of the administration’s increasingly aggressive enforcement posture, where even minor infractions can trigger visa revocation. The student’s visa was reinstated a few weeks later, but the case is troubling, for it shows that there can be serious consequences for nonserious criminal behavior such as administrative mistakes or minor legal citations. Foreign students are also being screened for political opinions, with the government checking social media accounts for vague criteria such as not believing in American values.

This trend has broader consequences for America’s long-term talent pipeline. For decades, foreign students—particularly in STEM fields—have formed a core component of the US innovation economy. Many arrive on F-1 student visas, transition to work under Optional Practical Training (OPT), and then eventually become permanent residents and citizens. Clogging this pipeline with unnecessary obstacles means that fewer of the world’s smartest young people will build careers and start companies in the United States. As universities report declines in international applications, and graduates face heightened risks of removal, the cumulative effect is to shrink the future pool of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who would otherwise contribute to American technological leadership.

In May 2025, the State Department reported a 22 percent drop in F-1 visas granted compared to the year before, and a 13 percent decline in J-1 visas, both used by foreign students. This decline is probably due to some combination of restrictions put on new arrivals, bureaucratic hurdles placed in their way, and foreigners simply seeing the United States as a less desirable destination than it used to be. Studyportals, a website that matches applicants to schools in other countries, reports a massive decline in interest in coming to the US among international students, reaching its lowest levels since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The losses that result from that drop-off will be felt by not only the US. One might imagine a simple global redistribution of talent, with the total amount of innovation in the world staying the same. If that is the case, we may not worry about the US pushing away skilled foreigners.

Unfortunately, returning to Glaeser’s arguments, there are outsized returns to clusters of smart people. If all of the most talented researchers in biotechnology were distributed among 10 major cities across the world, those researchers would accomplish much less than if they were concentrated in one or a few locales. That is because there are benefits to face-to-face interactions.

When smart people are in close geographic proximity, they can more efficiently exchange ideas and find ways to collaborate. That is why it still makes sense to move to the Bay Area if you are a tech entrepreneur, despite its high housing costs and the ease of remote work. The US has benefited both itself and the world by having localities where clusters of unusually talented people congregate. We are in danger of losing that advantage due to the administration’s policies.

Ultimately, we should be thinking about not only how to go back to the days of a more welcoming high-skilled immigration policy, but also about how to increase the number of talented migrants. Politics is making that more difficult. The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, championed in 2019 and 2020 by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), would have accelerated the path to permanent residency—and thus naturalization—for tens of thousands of skilled immigrants already working in the US, predominantly in STEM fields.

By eliminating per-country caps that limit the number of entrants into the US from individual countries, the bill would have dramatically shortened wait times for applicants from places such as India and China, significantly increasing the number of highly skilled workers eligible for citizenship over time. This shift would have raised the skill level of the American workforce and expanded the talent pool available to US companies, bolstering innovation and productivity and creating a larger class of potential inventors and entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, intense opposition from elements of the MAGA-aligned right, who argued that the bill would unfairly disadvantage American-born workers, ultimately doomed the effort.

Republicans since that time have decided not to touch the hot stove again. Any effort to increase the number of visas or naturalizations is now bound to stir up a cauldron of discontent among the president’s supporters and influencers. That’s doubly unfortunate, given that the president has on occasion expressed his support for high-skilled immigration, stating as recently as 2024 that “[when] you graduate from a [US] college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.”

Nativism is limited in how much damage it can do in terms of reducing the number of newcomers, because immigration policy is mostly set by statute, but much more harm is likely done by the fact that it has become politically impossible to enact the kinds of more open policies that have traditionally had bipartisan support and greatly benefited the nation.

Not everything done by the administration on this front has been negative. A proposed rule change to the H-1B lottery—giving preferences based on the salaries of applicants, from highest to lowest—would be particularly effective. Since earnings are a rough proxy for economic contribution and potential to innovate, this change would be an improvement on the current system. At the same time, such a shift would disadvantage early career professionals. While a change like that should be welcomed on balance, the goal should ultimately be many more visas given to skilled professionals, as two-thirds of H-1B applications are now rejected.

To support techno-optimism and techno-futurism while being hostile or indifferent toward high-skilled immigration is like worrying about climate change without prioritizing technologies that limit the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. High-skilled immigration is not one issue among many. Human capital is the ultimate input that determines whether cities, states, and nations rise and fall. Surely the same people who claim to worry about America’s decline and China’s rise should want innovation-friendly policies in the United States rather than in China?

It has often been noted that there is an uneasy alliance between the tech right and President Trump’s MAGA base, with the immigration issue often being highlighted as a major point of contention. I believe the idea that this is a minor divergence of opinion rather than an unreconcilable difference in worldviews can be held only by ignoring just how important high-skilled immigration is to technological progress. Human capital is not simply one factor in the combination it takes to have a successful, dynamic, and innovative economy. It is the foundation of progress. Without understanding that, all visions of a bold technological future are likely to end in disappointment.

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