What’s the United States’ most important problem? For the past three months, Americans have offered the same answer: immigration. More than inflation or political polarization, Americans are vexed by the influx of migrants. Republicans’ concerns spiked after the most recent southern-border crisis. But they’re not alone. In April, the number of independents who said immigration was the country’s biggest problem reached a high in Gallup polling dating back to 2014.

Scolding Americans for their alarm is pointless. The state of U.S. immigration policy is objectively chaotic. When Joe Biden became president, he rolled back some Trump-era restrictions, at the same time that migrants began to take greater advantage of loopholes in asylum law to stay in the country longer. Meanwhile, a sharp rise in crime in parts of Central and South America, combined with the strong U.S. economy, created the conditions for migration to surge. In 2022, illegal crossings hit a record high of 2.2 million. As asylum seekers made their way north, cities struggled to house them. In New York City, so many hotel rooms are taken up by migrants that it has created a historic shortage of tourist lodging.  

In a perfect world, the brokenness of America’s immigration system would inspire Congress to swiftly pass new legislation convincing voters that the U.S. controls whom we let in and keep out of the country. The basic contours of this grand bargain have been fairly clear for decades. In exchange for expanded opportunities for legal immigration—more visas, more green cards, and targeted policies to increase immigration in technology and science—liberals would agree to stricter enforcement and control at the border. But major immigration reform is stuck. Changing the law requires Congress, and in the latest example of feckless delay, Donald Trump has instructed congressional Republicans to sandbag negotiations with the White House, to avoid giving the Biden administration an election-year win. What we’re left with is the perception of immigration chaos, anger about the chaos, and dithering in the face of it.

If American politicians are ever going to think about immigration policy through the lens of long-term opportunity planning rather than immediate crisis response, they first need to convince the American people that those long-term opportunities exist. This case is actually easy to make. Cheaper and more plentiful houses, higher average wages, more jobs, more innovation, more scientific breakthroughs in medicine, and more state government revenue without higher taxes—all while sticking it to our geopolitical adversary, China—require more immigration. Across economics, national security, fiscal sustainability, and geopolitical power, immigration is the opposite of America’s worst problem. It holds clear solutions to America’s most pressing issues.

Immigration has for decades, even centuries, created a temporal paradox in American discourse: pride in the country’s history of immigration coming up against fears of its present and future. Benjamin Franklin, whose father was born in England, complained that migration from Central Europe would swarm the young nation’s Anglican culture with undue German influence. In the late 1800s, a more Germanic nation feared the influence of incoming Italians. A century later, a nation that had fully embraced Italian Americans bemoaned the influence of incoming Mexicans.

[Ari Berman: The conservative who turned white anxiety into a movement]

Although this brisk history of nativism might seem to make light of today’s anti-immigrant sentiment, ignoring the fears that people have about a sudden influx of migrants is counterproductive. The border crisis is not just a news-media illusion, or a platform for empty grandstanding. It really has endangered thousands of migrants and drained city and state resources, causing a liberal backlash even in deep-blue places. Last September, New York City Mayor Eric Adams predicted that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York.” As tens of thousands of migrants moved into Chicago, the city spent hundreds of millions of dollars to provide them with housing and education, building resentment among Black residents. What’s more, papering over anxieties about competition from foreign-born workers is not helpful. The Harvard economist Gordon Hanson asked me to think about the experience of a barber in an American city. If immigrants moving into his area open barber shops, they might reduce his ability to retain customers, raise prices, or make rent. The logic of fear is understandable: More competition within a given industry means less income for its incumbents.

Many Americans—and, really, many residents of every other nation—think about immigration through this lens of scarcity. If the economy includes a fixed number of jobs, then more foreign-born workers means less work left for Americans. If America contains a fixed number of houses, more immigrants means less space for Americans to live.

But the truth is that no nation comprises a fixed amount of work or income. Population growth, economic growth, and income growth can be mutually reinforcing. “At the national level, immigration benefits from a more-is-more principle,” Hanson told me. “More people, and more density of people, leads to good things happening, like more specialization of labor.”

Specialization of labor might sound drab and technical. But it’s a key part of why immigration can help even low-income workers earn more money over time. Last month, the economists Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri published a new paper concluding that, from 2000 to 2019, immigration had a “positive and significant effect” on wage growth for less educated native workers. The key mechanism, they found, is that, over time, immigrants and natives specialize in different jobs that complement one another. As low-education immigrants cluster in fields such as construction, machine operation, and home-health-aid work, native-born workers upgrade to white-collar jobs with higher pay. To take the example of the American barber, let’s imagine that his son decides to go to a trade school or college to increase his skills in response to intense competition for barbers. He might be better off, making a higher wage than he would have had he remained in the profession. Although such specialization can be difficult for some people who switch out of their parents’ fields, it can lead to a more dynamic economy with higher wages for all.

For the past few years, I have been thinking and writing about an abundance agenda to identify win-win policies for Americans in housing, energy, health care, and beyond. Immigration is an essential ingredient in this agenda. The U.S. must contend with a national housing shortage that has contributed to record-high living costs and bone-dry inventory in some major metros. This is a story not merely about overregulation, zoning laws, and permitting requirements, but also about labor supply. The construction industry is short several hundred thousand jobs. In the largest states—such as California, Texas, and New York—two in five construction workers are foreign-born, according to estimates by the National Association of Home Builders. “The biggest challenge that the construction industry is facing [is] that people don’t want their babies to grow up to be construction workers,” Brian Turmail, the vice president of public affairs at the Associated General Contractors of America, has said. If Americans want more houses, we might very well need more foreign-born workers to build them. Achieving clean-energy abundance requires immigrants too. One in six solar and photovoltaic installers is an immigrant, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and “23 percent of all green job workers are foreign born,” according to a report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The debate over low-skill immigration and its effect on the economy can get a bit technical, if you’re an economist, and emotional, if you’re an anxious native worker. But even if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on the complex macroeconomics of letting less educated migrants enter the U.S. in higher numbers, we cannot let that disagreement hold hostage the obvious benefits of expanding our recruitment of foreign-born talents into the U.S.

Immigration-as-recruitment is a particularly useful framework as the U.S. embraces a new kind of industrial policy to build more chips and clean-energy tech domestically. As The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip wrote, America’s new economic strategy has three parts. The first is subsidies to build products in the U.S. that are crucial to our national security and energy independence, such as advanced semiconductor chips and electric vehicles. The second part is tariffs on cheap Chinese imports in these sectors. The third is explicit restrictions on Chinese technology that could be used to surveil or influence U.S. companies and people, such as Trump-era laws against Huawei equipment and the Biden-era law to force the sale of TikTok.

But this newly fashioned stool is missing an essential leg. If the U.S. is going to become more strategically selfish about protecting key industries such as computer-chip manufacturing from foreign competition, we need to revamp our high-skill-immigration policy too. In fact, the new American economic paradigm doesn’t make any sense otherwise. As a rich country, the U.S. will be at a disadvantage in semiconductor manufacturing because of our higher labor costs. If we can't win on costs, we have to win on brains. That means staffing our semiconductor factories with the world’s most talented workers.

[Jack Herrera: Is Texas about to turn Latinos into single-issue voters?]

Semiconductor manufacturing requires a highly specialized workforce that is distributed around the world and concentrated in Asia. A large share of workers in advanced-chip manufacturing live in India and China. But green-card caps limit their ability to move to the U.S. As a result, we’re at risk of spending tens of billions of dollars on factories and products without a plan to staff them. “The talent shortage is the most critical issue confronting the semiconductor industry today,” Ajit Manocha, the president of the industry association for semiconductor equipment and materials manufacturers, said in 2022. This is a fixable problem. The Economic Innovation Group, a centrist think tank, has proposed a “Chipmaker’s Visa” that would annually authorize an accelerated path to a green card for 10,000 immigrants with specialized skills in semiconductor manufacturing.

What’s true for chipmaking is also true for AI development. According to the Federation of American Scientists, more “top-tier” AI researchers are born in China than in any other country in the world. But two-thirds of these elite researchers work in the U.S. The number could probably be even higher if the U.S. had a smarter, future-looking immigration policy regime. The administration has already taken small steps forward. In October, Biden issued an executive order that asked existing authorities to streamline visa criteria for immigrants with expertise in AI. More could be done with congressional help.

If the U.S. is in the early stages of a new cold war with the authoritarian axis of China, Russia, and Iran, we can’t logically pursue an industrial policy without an equally purposeful immigration policy. Immigration policy is industrial policy, because immigrants have for decades been a linchpin in our technological growth. As Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, has written, 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. start-ups belong to immigrants. And yet, we’ve allowed waiting times for green cards to grow, while the number of applicants stuck in immigration backlogs has gotten so large that some talented immigrants have stopped waiting and left the U.S. entirely. This is madness. Failing to solve the immigration-recruitment kludge as we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on technology subsidies is about as strategic as training to run a marathon while subsisting on a diet of donuts. When it comes to high-skill-immigration policy, we are getting in our own way.

Immigration is central to America’s national security, industrial policy, abundance agenda, affordability crisis, and technological dominance. Without a higher number of foreign-born workers, the U.S. will have less of everything that makes us materially prosperous. But none of these advantages should distract immigration proponents from the fact that failure to secure the border is a gift to immigration restrictionists. Border chaos is horrendous branding for the pro-immigration cause.

“Immigration is too important to be chaotic,” Hanson, the economist, told me. “Chaos leads to short-term policy fixes. But you don’t want a 10-month immigration policy for the U.S. You want a 100-year immigration policy.”

Taking that 100-year view leads to perhaps the most powerful case for expanding immigration. The Lancet recently published an analysis of global population trends through the end of the 21st century. By 2064, the worldwide human population will peak, researchers projected, at which point almost every rich country will have been shrinking for decades. Fertility is already below replacement level in almost every rich industrialized country in the world. In Japan and South Korea, there are already fewer working-age adults with every passing year. China’s birth rate has fallen by 50 percent in just the past decade. Within a few years, immigration will be the only dependable lever of population growth for every rich industrialized nation.

The U.S. faces a stark choice. Politicians can squander the fact that the U.S. is the world’s most popular destination for people on the move. They can frame immigration as a persistent threat to U.S. national security, U.S. workers, and the solidity of U.S. culture. Or they can take the century-long view and recognize that America’s national security, the growth of the U.S. labor force, and the project of American greatness all depend on a plan to demonstrate enough control over the border that we can continue to expand immigration without incurring the wrath of restrictionists.

Tech giant says investment in Southeast Asian country will 'pave the way for delivering the transformative power of AI'.

Earlier today, The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, announced in an internal email that the company has entered into a business partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. (The news was made public via a press release shortly thereafter.) Editorial content from this publication will soon be directly referenced in response to queries in OpenAI products. In practice, this means that users of ChatGPT, say, might type in a question and receive an answer that briefly quotes an Atlantic story; according to Anna Bross, The Atlantic’s senior vice president of communications, it will be accompanied by a citation and a link to the original source. Other companies, such as Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider and Politico, have made similar arrangements.

It does all feel a bit like publishers are making a deal with—well, can I say it? The red guy with a pointy tail and two horns? Generative AI has not exactly felt like a friend to the news industry, given that it is trained on loads of material without permission from those who made it in the first place. It also enables the distribution of convincing fake media, not to mention AI-generated child-sexual-abuse material. The rapacious growth of the technology has also dovetailed with a profoundly bleak time for journalism, as several thousand people have lost their jobs in this industry over just the past year and a half. Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has behaved in an erratic, ethically questionable manner, seemingly casting caution aside in search of scale. To put it charitably, it’s an unlikely hero swooping in with bags of money. (Others see it as an outright villain: A number of newspapers, including The New York Times, have sued the company over alleged copyright infringement. Or, as Jessica Lessin, the CEO of The Information, put it in a recent essay for this magazine, publishers “should protect the value of their work, and their archives. They should have the integrity to say no.”)

This has an inescapable sense of déjà vu. For media companies, the defining question of the digital era has simply been How do we reach people? There is much more competition than ever before—anyone with an internet connection can self-publish and distribute writing, photography, and videos, drastically reducing the power of gatekeepers. Publishers need to fight for their audiences tooth and nail. The clearest path forward has tended to be aggressively pursuing strategies based on the scope and power of tech platforms that have actively decided not to bother with the messy and expensive work of determining whether something is true before enabling its publication on a global scale. This dynamic has changed the nature of media—and in many cases degraded it. Certain types of headlines turned out to be more provocative to audiences on social media, thus “clickbait.” Google has filtered material according to many different factors over the years, resulting in spammy “search-engine optimized” content that strives to climb to the top of the results page.

At times, tech companies have put their thumb directly on the scale. You might remember when, in 2016, BuzzFeed used Facebook’s livestreaming platform to show staffers wrapping rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded; BuzzFeed, like other publishers, was being paid by the social-media company to use this new video service. That same year, BuzzFeed was valued at $1.7 billion. Facebook eventually tired of these news partnerships and ended them. Today, BuzzFeed trades publicly and is worth about 6 percent of that 2016 valuation. Facebook, now Meta, has a market cap of about $1.2 trillion.

“The problem with Facebook Live is publishers that became wholly dependent on it and bet their businesses on it,” Thompson told me when I reached out to ask about this. “What are we going to do editorially that is different because we have a partnership with OpenAI? Nothing. We are going to publish the same stories, do the same things—we will just ideally, I hope, have more people read them.” (The Atlantic’s editorial team does not report to Thompson, and corporate partnerships have no influence on stories, including this one.) OpenAI did not respond to questions about the partnership.

The promise of working alongside AI companies is easy to grasp. Publishers will get some money—Thompson would not disclose the financial elements of the partnership—and perhaps even contribute to AI models that are higher-quality or more accurate. Moreover, The Atlantic’s Product team will develop its own AI tools using OpenAI’s technology through a new experimental website called Atlantic Labs. Visitors will have to opt in to using any applications developed there. (Vox is doing something similar through a separate partnership with the company.)

But it’s just as easy to see the potential problems. So far, generative AI has not resulted in a healthier internet. Arguably quite the opposite. Consider that in recent days, Google has aggressively pushed an “AI Overview” tool in its Search product, presenting answers written by generative AI atop the usual list of links. The bot has suggested that users eat rocks or put glue in their pizza sauce when prompted in certain ways. ChatGPT and other OpenAI products may perform better than Google’s, but relying on them is still a gamble. Generative-AI programs are known to “hallucinate.” They operate according to directions in black-box algorithms. And they work by making inferences based on huge data sets containing a mix of high-quality material and utter junk. Imagine a situation in which a chatbot falsely attributes made-up ideas to journalists. Will readers make the effort to check? Who could be harmed? For that matter, as generative AI advances, it may destroy the internet as we know it; there are already signs that this is happening. What does it mean for a journalism company to be complicit in that act?

Given these problems, several publishers are making the bet that the best path forward is to forge a relationship with OpenAI and ostensibly work toward being part of a solution. “The partnership gives us a direct line and escalation process to OpenAI to communicate and address issues around hallucinations or inaccuracies,” Bross told me. “Additionally, having the link from ChatGPT (or similar products) to our site would let a reader navigate to source material to read the full article.” Asked about whether this arrangement might interfere with the magazine’s subscription model—by giving ChatGPT users access to information in articles that are otherwise paywalled, for example—Bross said, “This is not a syndication license. OpenAI does not have permission to reproduce The Atlantic’s articles or create substantially similar reproductions of whole articles or lengthy excerpts in ChatGPT (or similar products). Put differently, OpenAI’s display of our content cannot exceed their fair-use rights.”

I am no soothsayer. It is easy to pontificate and catastrophize. Generative AI could turn out to be fine—even helpful or interesting—in the long run. Advances such as retrieval-augmented generation—a technique that allows AI to fine-tune its responses based on specific outside sources—might relieve some of the most immediate concerns about accuracy. (You would be forgiven for not recently using Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, which runs on OpenAI technology, but it’s become pretty good at summarizing and citing its sources.) Still, the large language models powering these products are, as the Financial Times wrote, “not search engines looking up facts; they are pattern-spotting engines that guess the next best option in a sequence.” Clear reasons exist not to trust their outputs. For this reason alone, the apparent path forward offered by this technology may well be a dead end.