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There's a relevant essay from Arctotherium on this, you don't have to have mass immigration to bring in the top Taiwanese semiconductor experts, or German nuclear scientists or post-Soviet Russian STEM experts. You can bring in a few hundred or a few thousand people on 10x wages, have them stay for a few years to teach locals the skills and then have them leave or retire into obscurity.
China for instance brought in South Korean shipbuilding experts on high wages, worked out how to build ships and now dominates the world shipping industry. They tried this with semiconductors too, Taiwan actually passed laws to stop Chinese companies poaching semiconductor talent with high pay. Meiji Japan did this too, alongside others he mentions. Targeted skill acquisition does not require mass immigration.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-169701612
The US is very wealthy, they could close the door to the median-wage immigrants and keep the top talent, even aggressively headhunt top talent with high payouts. Not 'I published a crappy paper in one of those journals that exists for resume packing' but 'I'm actually really smart and have these rare skills'.
Furthermore, there are all kinds of problems with relying on mass immigration.
There is indeed a large amount of Indian talent, I see Indian names on various AI papers regularly. So why isn't India rich or at least on par with China? There's no Indian Deepseek, Huawei, BYD, J-20. There may well be something wrong with Indian culture or society that impedes this kind of development. Mass immigration would likely import this problem to some extent.
Suppose there's a disaster in America, it's one of those situations where all hands need to be on deck for a massive crisis. Would the Indians, Chinese, Latin Americans perhaps think 'not my problem' and head back to their home countries rather than giving their utmost? If they leave their country for a better life once, they can do it again if the situation changes.
Whatever issues with unity there are in America, it's hardly going to be helped by mass immigration. More ethnicities and diversity increases the potential for conflict. There are also the more basic costs of unfiltered 'Fuck Trump' mass immigration of randoms who come in via Mexico: drugs, crime, welfare payments, gaming the electoral system, demographic replacement.
Now it's fairly reasonable that some truly elite people will be turned off by the administration's rhetoric, even if the Trump admin did go 'we want the super smart but not the mediocre'. They might not want to come to America because overseas mainstream media blares out FASCIST USA. But it's not clear that this would be that bad compared to mass immigration.
We can see the results: Australia, Canada and the UK have been doing mass immigration. Racism has been suppressed by hate speech laws. The economic results/innovation in these countries have been underwhelming at best. Canadian GDP per capita has stagnated over the last 10 years. Britain is mired in all kinds of problems.
The strongest argument against Trumpism IMO is that it puts these loudmouths in charge, who go around openly declaring their strategies and letting their opponents counter them: https://x.com/Jukanlosreve/status/1958334108989530207
They're simple and unsophisticated thinkers in a complex world.
But even there, you don't have to be loud and obnoxious to be dumb. The EU is full of sober, hard-working, reasonable and civilized leaders who do immense damage to Europe by constantly making terrible decisions.
My impression is that almost everyone on the Grok and OpenAI teams are either the children of immigrants or people who came to the US as the children. This seems to be the case for almost all of our very highly successful first and second generation immigrants.
Lots of these people are second or third generation immigrants by now. They're Americans.
In my opinion, US immigration seems to be broadly work. If Arctotherium had made these predictions 30 years ago, he would have been proven wrong. Sure, we can reduce immigration, but what we do re Chinese and Indian immigrants seems to be working very well.
What predictions does he make that you think are wrong?
Arctotherium says this regarding AI:
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