High-skilled Immigration: The Way Ahead to Stay Ahead

The New Bazaar

On today’s episode, Cardiff chats with his EIG colleagues Adam Ozimek, chief economist, and Connor O’Brien, research analyst, about the one policy that achieves all three of the following goals simultaneously:

1. It massively boosts the rate of economic growth through its effects on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the creation of entire new industries.

1. It reduces inequality.

1. Not only does it cost the taxpayers nothing, it actually saves them huge sums of money.

That policy is the expansion of high-skilled immigration, a subject that became a source of contentious debate within the American right not long after the 2024 election. As it happens, Adam and Connor are the co-authors (with John Lettieri) of a big new report, Exceptional by Design, which explains how to design a high-skilled immigration that will maximize its benefits for American workers, businesses, and communities.

In this chat, the three discuss:

• How bad thinking has led to bad policy
• The surprisingly nuanced economics of high-skilled immigration
• Three myths about high-skilled immigration
• The flaws in the current system
• A new policy vision to change it

The three close with a discussion of why high-skilled immigration carries so much promise for the United States in particular — and the enormous, self-inflicted damage of failing to capitalize on it.

RELATED LINK

• Exceptional by Design, by Adam Ozimek, Connor O’Brien, and John Lettieri

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