America Can’t Outsource Its Future

High-skilled immigration is no substitute for cultivating our own people

Recently in an interview, President Donald J. Trump sparked backlash on the political right after telling Laura Ingraham that the U.S. should take in 600,000 Chinese international students to “save” American universities.12He also claimed that there aren’t enough talented Americans, framing foreign recruitment as a necessity. Watching Ingraham take a more restrictionist stance than the former “America First” candidate was not what many of his supporters expected or hoped for.

To his credit, Trump has generally performed better on high-skilled immigration than his predecessors—the administration attempted to replace the H-1B lottery with a salary-based system 3 and proposed a $100,000 visa application fee.4 But rhetoric matters. Perceived pro-immigration signaling is easily exploited by interest groups and creates a sense of betrayal among supporters. More importantly, Trump’s factual claims about foreign “top talent” do not hold up to scrutiny.

Advocates frequently argue that high-skilled immigration is essential because immigrant groups have high educational attainment. But “education” does not measure skill equally well between immigrants and natives. International comparisons show this clearly: American computer science seniors significantly outperform their counterparts in China, India, and Russia, even when comparing elite to elite and non-elite to non-elite institutions.

Consistent with this, Richwine (2019; 2022) finds that immigrants with the same educational levels as natives perform substantially worse on tests of literacy, numeracy, and computer operations. A recent replication confirms this pattern.5

Bertoli & Stillman (2019) show the same thing from another angle: when selecting a highly educated immigrant at random, he or she earns less than a less-educated immigrant from the same country 24.7% of the time, compared to 13.8% for natives. This weaker link between education and earnings helps explain why highly educated immigrants are disproportionately found in low-skill jobs. Many really are less skilled than their credentials suggest. 6

In practice, selecting immigrants simply for being “highly educated” backfires—swelling the ranks of low-skilled workers while intensifying competition for Americans.7

If the U.S. truly faced a shortage of top STEM talent, this should apply upward pressure onto employers to offer higher compensation. Yet, as Camarota & Richwine (2025) show, compensation in STEM has been stagnant over time, and we already have a massive pool of STEM graduates that don’t have STEM jobs. Surely, the sensible thing would be to try to recruit those first?

Trump’s comments specifically referenced the H-1B program, often defended on the grounds that immigrants disproportionately contribute to innovation. But treating immigrants as a single homogeneous group is misleading. After all, there is no country called “Immigrasia” where all the immigrants come from. In a past analysis of mine, I utilized USCIS data from 2000-2023 for countries with continuous data (U.K., France, Canada, China, and India) to compare each nationality’s share of H-1Bs to its representation in various innovation metrics. A consistent pattern emerges:

• The U.K., France, and Canada are strongly overrepresented in innovation relative to all H-1B beneficiaries.
• China and India, despite enormous shares of H-1B beneficiaries, are strongly underrepresented.

India alone accounts for nearly 62% of all H-1B beneficiaries during this period; China for nearly 10%. By contrast, the U.K., France, and Canada together make up less than 6%. Yet these small contributors generate far more innovation per capita than the giants. It is not clear that the H-1B system is very good at actually identifying “top talent”.

But perhaps as a post-hoc reaction, immigration advocates will argue that H-1Bs are the wrong population of foreign workers for comparison even if that’s literally the exact group they were supporting prior to confronting reality. Well, the American Immigration Council provides a breakdown of the national origins of foreign-born STEM workers in 2019, and there is also data available from the Stanford Graduate School of business showing the immigrant founders of unicorn companies from 1997-2019. Adjusting the results, not much changes. India and China both remain underrepresented, their rates compared to all foreign STEM workers being roughly 0.60 and 0.52, respectively, while Europe and the Anglosphere remain well over-represented.

Meanwhile, Fortune 200 CEOs are overwhelmingly native-born, and the few foreign-born CEOs are almost entirely from Europe. Fortune 100 founders and CEOs are also more than 80% are white. The pattern is remarkably consistent across industries: innovation is heavily skewed toward Europeans and Anglosphere immigrants, and far less toward the groups supplying the bulk of our visas.

All of this corroborates with the results of a report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation which measured innovation via R&D awards and triadic patents for large tech companies, life sciences, information technology, and material sciences (Nager et al., 2016). The rates of representation are calculated by dividing a group’s share of the innovation sample by their share of the total American population in 2015. When looking at the foreign-born population, Europeans are 8.2× over represented in innovation, Asians 4.5× when compared to their share of the U.S. population.

Among natives, whites innovate at higher rates than Asians as well. In fact, native-born Asians are actually modestly underrepresented.

Another issue: there is a finite global supply of elite talent, and one can only poach so much before what we’re getting is just mediocre. Unsurprisingly, it’s been found that increasing the number of immigrants from a country tends to result in the average being less skilled (Lazear, 2021). The distribution of innovation follows a Lotka curve, meaning novel breakthroughs come from a tiny slice of individuals, and this has been true throughout history (Murray, 2003). Because of this, massive increases in immigration yield only a handful of true innovators at best, and often none at all.

Further, much of what is labeled “immigrant innovation” is not truly novel invention but capturing a profitable node in an inevitable economic process. This is harder to quantify, but is easy enough to understand. To quote @AnechoicMedia_:

Most specific companies and their founders don’t matter that much to people not invested in them specifically. The economic activity they preside over was inevitable and it’s only a zero-sum question of who captures the market. The model of being a top business today has been to capture some conduit of economic activity, rather than being a manufacturer of widgets.

This is most true in the case of social media companies, which exist to maximize engagement and sell ads. The rise of a new media platform just re-routes a limited pool of attention to a new fiefdom. If any one founder of the site-that-would-be-twitter didn’t exist, it’s not like the economic activity represented by twitter ceases to exist from that timeline. But the people in charge do matter to the rules that are in place and what content gets promoted, so handing control of your media to foreigners loses native editorial control while creating no new value.

The same is true of much of the tech world that exists as extensions of physical services. Something like Uber was inevitable as soon as the smartphone proliferated. Ride-sharing systems with electronic reputation management was imagined by writers as early as the 1970s. The smartphone made this politically unstoppable, and it was only a question of which company would scramble fastest to grab the market, by the most legally questionable means.

If you add a hundred new genius “founders” to America, there’s not going to be a hundred Ubers or Twitters because the market was only ever going to support a particular concentration of firms, a certain amount of user engagement, a certain amount of consumer spending to collect fees on. As an American it’s more important that the set of institutions enabled by present technology end up being controlled by people who share your values.

But let’s suppose for a moment that the imported talent we got were truly exceptional and brilliant. Those who advocate for the policy of “high-skilled immigration” in the first place often support it as a geopolitical strategy for the United States to maintain a competitive edge on the world stage. We live in the 21st century, whereby ideas easily diffuse across borders due to technology, and immigration accelerates this process. To the contrary of importing Chinese students to “beat China”, what it really does is narrow the technological gap between the United States and China by indirectly transferring our technical expertise to them. Bernstein et al. (2022), for example, notes that “in surveys of Silicon Valley, 82% of Chinese and Indian immigrant scientists and engineers report exchanging technical information with their respective nations (Saxenian (2002); Saxenian et al. (2002))” (p. 17). Moreover, immigrants in academia show strong co-ethnic bias in collaboration. Consequently, innovation gains tend to circulate within ethnic networks, not to the broader American public.

This is why the greatest success stories with brain drain throughout history have never been through importing large numbers of foreigners but rather targeted recruitment of a handful of top experts for key industries and sectors where expertise is needed, with the expectation that these foreign experts transfer their knowledge to natives.

Lastly, there is the matter of immigrant politics. As I have already covered previously, nonwhites, including those identifying as Republican, lean left ideologically. Additionally, the so-called “red shift” during the 2024 presidential election was mostly an illusion: racial minorities can change political affiliations, but their underlying political attitudes and preferences remain stable. The change in political affiliation among nonwhites is largely due to the changing nature of the GOP to become more palatable to them (the same is also true for American Jews). A GOP that becomes a vehicle for the interests of immigrants—analogous to how the Democrats became the post-Civil Rights party of black voters—is not a victory. Rather, it simply changes which interest groups set the agenda. And, as we’re beginning to see already, this multiracial coalition, if it ever truly existed, is already gradually undoing itself, as nonwhites are reverting back towards the Democratic Party. But this merely demonstrates that it was always just a façade to begin with.

The political risks go beyond ideology. Foreign governments have leveraged immigrant populations as political tools. A lesson can be learned from Canada’s example in which the Chinese government was able to swing the outcome of an election by providing fake documentations to Chinese students and then busing them to vote for their preferred candidate.

But what specific relevance does politics have with high-skilled immigration in particular? Well, consider that the heritability of political views is stronger among twins that are more knowledgeable (Kalmoe & Johnson, 2021). We can therefore expect high-skilled immigrants to demonstrate greater persistence in their political attitudes and thus have the ability to exert disproportionate political influence.

How much does this influence matter? The answer is a lot. Consider this: when average Americans (50th percentile) and affluent Americans (90th percentile) disagree on policy, it is the affluent whose preferences dominate the final outcome. The impression that ordinary citizens wield meaningful political power is largely an illusion produced by high correlation in policy preferences. On many issues, average and affluent Americans simply happen to agree, creating the appearance of responsiveness where none truly exists. Once you separate out that overlap, the degree to which the average American supports or opposes a policy is almost entirely unrelated to whether that policy is ultimately enacted. Even more telling is that this pattern is not unique to the United States. Across Western and Northern Europe—societies often held up as more egalitarian or economically progressive—the same pattern of unequal responsiveness emerges. Wherever it is measured carefully, the preferences of the affluent consistently overpower those of everyone else. The implication is straightforward: changing the composition of the elite by importing high-skilled immigrants who are hostile to the nation’s interests is far more dangerous than expanding low-skill immigration. It accelerates elite detachment from the public and shifts national policy in ways that ordinary Americans have no meaningful power to counter. 8

In the end, a serious nation does not gamble its future on comforting myths about talent pipelines or on the hope that foreigners will somehow deliver prosperity or geopolitical advantage. A nation that believes in itself does not scour the world for replacements; it builds, educates, repairs, and demands excellence from within. The irony is that the very politicians and commentators who claim to defend American strength reach instinctively for policies that, over time, dissolve the foundations of that strength. They treat “high-skilled immigration” like a cheat code when it will merely further the decline of the country. America can indeed be made great again, as the president likes to say, but to do so, it’s time to invest in Americans once more.

3

It’s hard to overstate how awful the lottery system is. Most of the visas wind up going to outsourcing and staffing companies, the latter of which have gamed the lottery by submitting multiple entries. They do this while offering comparatively lower salaries, as can be seen below:

8

To add on to this point, people often hold the perception that American elites are left-wing. This is only partly true. The elite opinion is heavily skewed by American Jews, who are uniquely leftist.

Visual by @AnechoicMedia_