This essay is a follow-up to my Washington Post piece and a companion to a recent talk I gave at the Progress Conference 2026. It is specifically addressed to people who already favor (skilled) immigration and care about economic growth (the abundance and progress communities) to make the case that they should be championing top talent immigration as a signature issue above anything else. The speech has been edited for clarity and lightly expanded, with sources and context in the footnotes.
Here is the number I want everyone who cares about progress and abundance to know: 80%. That is roughly how many American voters support bringing in more highly skilled immigrants. Remarkably, this number holds up no matter how you ask the question, no matter who you ask, no matter how you frame it. But this is also a pro-growth policy that neither party has made much of a priority. Nor, for that matter, have most of us here. Still, large majorities support it across party lines, including among those voters who are still angry about the border and skeptical about immigration in general.1
Think about it. Eight out of 10 Americans actually agree on something, including most Trump voters. It is close to a prototypical “80/20 issue,” the kind of lopsided majority that political strategists spend their careers searching for and almost never find. For comparison, in recent surveys, expanding nuclear power polled at 59%. Many YIMBY proposals struggle to reach even majority support. Support for “deregulation” has never once hit 50% in a quarter-century of tracking. So, if you are building a coalition around growth, attracting talent is one of the most popular pro-growth policies available. Yet we treat it as too dangerous to touch.
So yes, I want to convince you all here to do more about immigration. Not any immigration, and not even the so-called “skilled” immigration generally, but at least the part where we bring in the world’s best people to work here. To be more precise, I mean people with exceptional abilities whom employers are competing to recruit, whose expertise they cannot readily find at home even when they are willing to pay for it. That includes leading scientists and engineers with highly specialized experience in AI and other key fields. I call this top talent immigration.
A lot of ink has been spilled on what immigration is or what effects it has had, and I have contributed to this discussion myself. But now, I am much more interested in what immigration could be. People can have all sorts of legitimate concerns about immigration, concerns that shouldn’t be dismissed, but still recognize that we could do better on the issue. We don’t have to agree about every migrant or even H-1B worker to agree that at least we want to get the top foreign talent here. Yet this broad support has done little to protect skilled immigrants from new restrictions and attacks.
So my argument for today has two parts. One is that top talent immigration can be unbundled from the rest of immigration policy, which now holds it hostage. We can make progress on the popular part without settling every other immigration dispute. And two is that just being okay with it is not enough. Attracting top talent should come first within the progress or abundance agendas,2 which means putting our money where our mouth is and sometimes prioritizing it over other issues. Talent is paramount, since the best people we recruit can help us accomplish almost everything else we want to do, starting with AI.
AI shows what we could gain or lose
Artificial intelligence—one thing I know for sure that a lot of us here actually care about—provides a particularly clear example of what we could gain from attracting top talent or lose by failing to do so. The vast majority of leading AI researchers in this country were born or educated abroad, with many coming from China. The American advantage in AI is, to a remarkable degree, an immigration advantage.3
Whether we care most about American leadership in AI or about AI safety, we should care about where the people actually building it choose to work. The US is still the leading destination for top AI and most other talent despite our convoluted immigration system, but China is becoming better at retaining its own researchers. Recruiting someone who would otherwise strengthen a lab in a competing country can improve America’s relative position. And since some of the pressure to build AI quickly comes from fear of what China will do, a stronger position can also give us more room to test systems before we release them. Any scientist educated in China or anywhere else abroad who wants to build a career here is a potential contributor to American research. With the right security checks, we should judge each person’s work on its merits and do our best to bring them here to stay.
But we also know that right now the system for bringing these people here too often works like an obstacle course. In a survey of AI researchers living in the United States, the vast majority identified visa and immigration problems as a serious impediment to research. A change in presidents or who controls Congress will not, by itself, solve this issue. Even a much friendlier administration in the future would still inherit visa caps and green-card queues, while employers would still have to work through the limited and convoluted routes available to a particular recruit.4 That is, unless we do something about it.
We can unbundle top talent from the rest
That brings me to the first part of my argument. I’m pretty sure most people here are already pro-immigration and certainly agree that we should bring in top scientists and engineers. The less obvious claim I want to argue is that we can pursue this top talent agenda without solving the entire immigration debate first.
Right now my sense is that the progress and abundance movements, alongside most people on the center-left and center-right, are hesitant to champion this issue. Let’s take, for instance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, the book of the movement. It mentions skilled immigration but barely engages with it as a major growth lever. When I have voiced these concerns, progress-oriented writers and thinkers have told me privately, more than once, that immigration is all good but too polarizing to include explicitly in their growth pitch. Leading with it, the argument goes, could alienate allies and drag every other worthy reform from housing to energy abundance into a bigger culture-war fight.
I understand the instinct. I just think it concedes too much. It is also arguably counterproductive because if you don’t provide an affirmative case for some immigration that you need and voters already agree with, somebody else will provide an even more convincing case against most of it.
It is true that immigration in the abstract is toxic, because voters see illegal crossings and real visa abuse by people willing to break the rules. But the resulting backlash does not extend to welcoming top talent, especially if it comes via specific, well-designed, legal programs. In my recent book, I document at length that regular voters—including those who are not very informed about the issue—can still distinguish between different kinds of immigration. Someone can absolutely want the government to control the border and deport everyone who is here illegally, but still also want the world’s best scientists to work here—and not in China.
People who say we need order before more immigration have a point, and I have made the case for enforcing the rules myself. But what exactly are we waiting for when it comes to top talent? Border Patrol encounters at the southern border just fell to their lowest annual level in more than 50 years. We still need more administrative capacity, but the United States can screen and admit a limited group of scientists and engineers while we build it. We can make those channels work better without waiting for an agreement about asylum or legalization.
Yes, we have done this before
Immigration has always been divisive, yet America has been able to do this before, so we can do this again. In 1992, Congress passed the Soviet Scientists Immigration Act, giving hundreds of weapons scientists a route to permanent residence following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite its name, nobody thought of it as immigration legislation, and the bill cleared both chambers easily on a simple nonproliferation rationale. The idea was that bringing those researchers here would help keep their expertise from spreading to our geopolitical rivals. I’m glad that people in Congress could agree on something constructive related to immigration, at least back then, without agreeing on everything about the issue.5
The idea has since resurfaced across party lines in Congress and beyond.6 Most recently, for example, the Institute for Progress proposed an Office of Talent Assessment in the Defense or State Department to recruit leading foreign scientists. The proposal starts with 80 green cards a year for principal recruits in defense-relevant fields. I would personally favor something much broader, both in the number of people and the fields covered. But the general idea makes perfect sense: someone would have the official job of finding the people America needs for the sake of national security and helping them build careers here.
We know that some people and politicians will oppose expanding immigration of any kind regardless of how we describe it. The main historical lesson here is that unbundling is possible. In fact, you can design a specific immigration program around benefits both people and their representatives can see, and pass it despite all other disagreements.
Why broad support still loses
Now to the second part of my argument. So if most people want this, why does so little happen? That is, apart from the fact that Congress is not doing much of anything. In more than 15 years of studying immigration and public opinion, I keep coming back to the same finding: people who oppose immigration tend to consider it more important than people who support it.
The same research also found a difference within the issue. Immigration supporters are especially concerned about helping the less fortunate immigrants already here, while opponents focus more on preventing future arrivals. That leaves the talented people who might come here with few champions. They cannot vote, and the research they might do or the companies they might build do not yet have anyone depending on them.
I should admit my own field is no better. Migration researchers, especially outside of economics, tend to treat immigration as a humanitarian topic first. In my experience, advocates and academics like me are rarely moved by the plight of potential legal immigrants blocked by per-country caps or US businesses unable to recruit because of visa quotas. While presenting the research behind my first book, I was asked many times why anyone should care about unrealized skilled immigration when so many less fortunate immigrants are being deported and denied entry at the border right now.
It is an understandable question coming from a good place, but my answer has always been the same. We live in a democracy—so we need to do what’s good for us in our country and what is popular, even if it sometimes means prioritizing some migrants and policies over others. That also means being more attuned to trade-offs—if we want the world’s best scientists here, we should be willing to accept restrictions elsewhere, especially on distant family migration or asylum, in exchange. Besides, doing so can also help build a more trusted migration system that benefits everyone, including the most vulnerable.
This lack of sustained pressure on skilled immigration from either business or advocates helps explain how an administration can attack it despite its broad support. Over the past year, the Trump administration has imposed a six-figure fee on some H-1B petitions and then proposed a new version. Employers and states have challenged restrictions in court. But when supporters look elsewhere, restrictionists—who oppose most immigration and are now mostly in the Republican Party—have more room to act while in power.
What you can do now
Our Congress could and absolutely should expand legal routes for top talent, and there are some encouraging bipartisan proposals that still have a chance, from state-sponsored visas to keeping more American-trained STEM graduates here. But I have little optimism about major legislation in the current political environment, especially if it is anything comprehensive. Fortunately, folks here can actually do quite a lot without waiting for Congress.
If you are hiring or trying to get hired, make greater use of the O-1A extraordinary ability visa. The program has no numerical cap and no lottery. This visa exists, and many more companies and immigrants should use it. For some researchers, the national interest waiver, a green card you can apply for on your own if your work matters to the country, can work as well. Ask an immigration lawyer which route fits you or the people you want to recruit. Employers should pay for that assessment and the legal help that gets people through it.7
And if you or your business has access to the administration or even a large following on social media, this should be one of the things you raise. Explain which rules prevented you from hiring top talent you needed, especially if it was in the clear national interest. And push for better rules and faster processing while pushing back on clearly bad proposals like the newly proposed OPT fee or the elimination of the H-1B grace period.8
If you work at an AI company, you may be reasonably calculating that it is better not to be on the bad side of the current administration. You may also think that, with AI building and improving itself, you will not need as much top talent anymore. Even if that is true, getting the best people here as soon as possible becomes even more important. If AI systems will soon do much of their own research, the people who build and oversee them over the next few years will largely decide where that research goes. If the stakes are as high as you say, who gets to work on these systems here should matter more to you than staying on any administration’s good side.
If you are a philanthropist, you can sponsor the recruitment and legal help to process extraordinary ability and other visas that smaller employers cannot afford. The policy side needs people and money too, meaning analysts who read every rule the agencies propose and file comments on the record, and lawyers who challenge the ones that make top talent immigration harder. Of course, some organizations such as the Institute for Progress already do sustained work on this issue. But they still need more manpower and resources behind them to make politicians take it seriously.
Let me be clear. This year it is the proposed OPT and H-1B fees. Next year it will be something with a different name, so the people who care about this issue should have a standing capacity to respond, the way the housing and energy wings of this movement already do when some ruling moves against them. That newly built capacity needs to survive changes of administration.
If you work in government and want America to prosper by recruiting global talent, you do not have to concede this issue just because immigration in general is toxic. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, promising voters you will be tough on immigration does not oblige you to turn away a Chinese scientist who wants to be here and who is needed in this country. You can keep your popular commitment to enforcement and still improve the skilled pathways that voters like just as much. The government should also invest in the staff and systems that process applications. As I argued before, faster decisions on both admissions and removals reduce uncertainty for everyone, whether you think immigration in general is good or bad. Expanding paid premium processing for all sorts of immigration paperwork could fund more staff and shorter waits.9
And if you are a conservative, you know that you are a part of the coalition that is currently on the restrictive side of the immigration debate. But, if anything, this means that you should push for top talent immigration even more. Being selective about whom we admit is politically advantageous. So is showing voters, including the moderates still undecided between the two parties, that Republicans are not just hostile to all foreigners no matter what, but a party that wants what’s best for our country. Conservative parties around the world can attest to that.10
So, let me close with this. I’m telling you this both as an immigrant from Soviet Russia and as someone who recently came out in favor of American nationalism. I truly believe America is great because it is a place of freedom and opportunity where builders can turn their ideas into reality no matter where they come from. That is exactly why most of the world’s top talent still wants to be here despite all the hurdles we put in their way. This is our ultimate strength.
So let’s stop letting paperwork block top talent for no good reason. In the end, if the progress movement cannot win this fight, where both the evidence and the public are already on our side, we won’t be able to win any of the harder ones.
When EIG asked whether "openness to the best entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors" improves the US standard of living, 84 percent agreed. Across 12 advanced economies surveyed by Pew, large pluralities or outright majorities supported encouraging highly skilled people to immigrate. EIG's 2024 national survey found that 74% of American voters supported increasing high-skilled immigration, or 78% after receiving a definition. Also, 79% said welcoming top scientists and engineers is important for competing with China. In conjoint survey experiments, education and skilled occupation are among the strongest predictors of acceptance across countries and groups.
Of course, the "abundance" and "progress" movements are not identical. Broadly, abundance focuses on access to existing technologies and removing regulatory bottlenecks, while progress focuses on pushing the technological frontier outward. The argument here applies equally to each, so I will use the terms interchangeably.
In Voices of Innovation, CSET identified 217 leading US-based AI researchers using publication and citation measures for 2010–2021. About 70% were born or educated abroad. Among the top-tier researchers (roughly the top 20%) working at US institutions, 38% had studied in China and 37% in the United States.
The survey reached 524 researchers who had published at leading AI conferences. Among respondents living in the United States, 69% identified visa and immigration difficulties as a serious impediment to high-quality research. Professional opportunities were the most commonly selected factor in decisions about where to move.
The Soviet Scientists Immigration Act of 1992 initially allowed up to 750 qualifying scientists and engineers a route to permanent residence without the usual job-offer requirement. Its eligibility centered on expertise associated with weapons of mass destruction. The legislative record shows passage by voice vote, and President George H. W. Bush signed it on October 24, 1992. Operation Paperclip is an earlier, even if somewhat more morally compromised, example of deliberate recruitment: the US brought German specialists here after World War II, including people implicated in the Nazi regime.
In 2020, Democrat Jim Langevin and Republican Elise Stefanik introduced the National Security Innovation Pathway Act. It would have created a route to permanent residence for scientists and other experts whose work clearly served US national security as judged by the Defense Department. Sadly, as happens with many good bipartisan ideas related to migration, the bill did not become law.
O-1A requires a major award or three of eight criteria and an employer or agent to petition. It is a temporary status, and dependent spouses cannot work. The national interest waiver is an EB-2 green card that anyone with an advanced degree can apply for on their own, from any country and in any field, if their work serves the national interest. It is subject to the per-country caps, so it is of little use to Indian and Chinese applicants for now, and approval rates have fallen sharply since 2023.
DHS's September 11 proposal would remove the discretionary grace period of up to 60 days after job loss for covered workers, including O-1 and H-1B holders. Its August 25 proposal would add a $103,265 charge to cap-subject H-1B petitions, including those under the advanced-degree exemption. Its October 8 proposal would set a $70,000 fee for each student's Optional Practical Training (OPT), which lets international students work in their field of study, plus $30,000 for the STEM extension.
Di Martino's 2022 proposal estimated $4.33 billion in additional annual revenue under its fee and uptake assumptions. Concrete expansions include H-4 work permits and employment-based adjustment applications (I-485).