🗽✨ Yes, more skilled immigration is good for America

There shouldn't even be a debate about this

Item: This week’s furor around venture capitalist/Musk friend Sriram Krishnan’s appointment to the Trump administration highlighted how the two forms of outrage don’t always overlap. The civil war between pixel patriots took place, fittingly, on Musk’s social-media platform X between some of the loudest players in Donald Trump’s orbit, exposing that the echoverse that gave the world’s richest man so much influence with the president-elect isn’t in lockstep with him on everything.

The MAGA world fissure stems from an old tweet by Krishnan, an Indian immigrant, supporting the removal of the country cap on green cards for skilled immigration, the kind of issue backed by Musk and other Silicon Valley players. “We need the best, regardless of where they happen to be born,” Krishnan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in November. - “MAGA vs. Musk: Immigration Fight Cracks Populist-Tech Bro Alliance,” The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 27, 2024)

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Presenting and encouraging pro-growth economic policy — a key purpose of this high-value newsletter — often means reflecting on the past. My Conservative Futurism greatly values historical insights as an Up Wing way of informing future actions. Such reflection a) helps promote a reasonable humility about what can be achieved and b) cautions against overreach or silly utopian ambitions. And while I often discuss cutting-edge economic research, it’s also worthwhile to consider the classic economists.

The debate about US high-skill immigration policy that has recently exploded on social media is a good example of the need for Americans to reacquaint themselves with the economic basics. Or maybe learn about those basics for the very first time.