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:
- It massively boosts the rate of economic growth through its effects on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the creation of entire new industries.
- It reduces inequality.
- 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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
