Millions of young Americans are denied careers because Harvard and other elite universities prefer foreigners and selected minorities, Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreesen told an audience at the Ronald Reagan National Economic Forum.
“If you’re a family … where I grew up [Wisconsin], and you’ve got a smart kid, and you think you’re going to get them into a top university in this country … there is no chance,” Andreeson told his rapt audience.
“It is nearly impossible for somebody coming from, like, a Midwestern or rural background or southern background to get in,” because of migration and group favoritism in “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” priorities, he said, adding:
By the way, this doesn’t just affect white people. Obviously, we now see how it’s affecting Jewish people. But it actually also affects African Americans in a very interesting way, which is actually because both the universities and the corporate employers … literally import Africans so that they don’t have to hire African-Americans.
Interviewer Joe Lonsdale released an interview with Andreesen on July 3.
But President Donald Trump and his deputies have begun pressuring elite universities to welcome Americans by scaling back their use of “DEI” programs and their lucrative inflow of career-seeking foreign customers.
On Wednesday, July 9, the Department of Homeland Security sued Harvard University for more data about its foreign students. “If Harvard won’t defend the interests of its students, then we will,” Secretary Kristi Noem said, adding:
We tried to do things the easy way with Harvard. Now, through their refusal to cooperate, we have to do things the hard way. Harvard, like other universities, has allowed foreign students to abuse their visa privileges and advocate for violence and terrorism on campus.
The Associated Press reported July 9:
International students at Harvard, who accounted for 27 percent of total enrollment in the 2024-2025 academic year, are a major source of income for the Ivy League institution.
The government already cut around $3.2 billion of federal grants and contracts benefiting Harvard and pledged to exclude the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution from any future federal funding.
Harvard has been at the forefront of Trump’s campaign against top universities after it defied his calls to submit to oversight of its curriculum, staffing, student recruitment and “viewpoint diversity.”
Foreign students — mostly Indian and Chinese — get roughly one-in-four spots in the Ivy League universities, which act as the gateway to the most promising business-related careers.
Many of the foreign graduates are quietly provided with prestigious jobs via ethnic hiring networks within the little-known Optional Practical Training work-permit program.
“We have so many smart people in this country who are not being properly trained, properly educated, and properly employed, but we really, genuinely do,” Andreesen told Lonsdale. “We have tons of smart kids running around who have all kinds of potential, who have been completely cut out of opportunity for the last 50 years.”
The elites’ decision to exclude millions of young Americans from the opportunities offered to foreign youths is driving a huge political divide in the United States, Andreesen said. “This is what I realize … If you’re in the center of the country, you’re just like, ‘Wow, these people really hate me, they really hate my kids. Like, they’re really out to get me.’ That’s just such a toxic dynamic. It would be a very, very bad thing to continue.”
Andreesen’s viewpoint about the impact of migration is sharply different from that of his fellow investors, who focus their attention on the business benefits of importing clever migrants. For example, Elon Musk has formed a new political party that is intended to protect white-collar migration into Americans’ jobs.
But the rejection of so many Americans is a huge economic threat to the nation, Andreesen argued:
This fundamental issue, which kind of nobody wants to talk about, but I’ve started to talk about, is the intersection of DEI and immigration. That has really warped our perceptions on high-skilled immigration over the last 50 years.
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What level of untapped talent exists in this country that a combination of DEI and immigration have basically cut out of the loop for the last 50 years? And how long can we have this story to everybody in the Midwest and the South that says, “Sorry, because of historical oppression, your kids are SoL.”
The government has allowed shareholders and CEOs in the Fortune 500 to place at least 1.5 million foreign graduates in a wide variety of technology, accounting, managerial, healthcare, and teaching jobs. The government also allows companies to provide the huge economic bonus of green cards to roughly 70,000 foreign graduates each year.
This massive hiring of foreigners has slashed salaries for Americans, reduced family formation and births, allowed a massive loss of technological advantage to other countries, weakened national security, minimized online privacy, and aided massive levels of online scamming by criminals in India and elsewhere.
Most of those hires are Indian and Chinese graduates, and they are imported via the H-1B and other visa programs, regardless of laws barring discrimination against job candidates.
In a February 2025 conversation with interviewer Lex Fridman, Andreesen explained his growing opposition to the nation’s skewed system for legalized migration. He said he supports elite migration to innovate and create new industries, but noted that:
There is in no sense a talent flow from rural Wisconsin into high tech. Like, not at all. There is also, in no sense, a talent flow from the rest of the Midwest into high tech. There is no talent flow from the South into high tech. There is no flow from the Sun Belt into high tech. There’s no flow from, you know, the Deep South into high tech … There’s this whole section of the country just where the people, for some reason, don’t end up in tech.
Now that’s a little bit strange, because these are the people who put a man on the moon. These are the people who built the World War II war machine. These are the people, at least, their ancestors, are the people who built the second industrial revolution and built the railroads and built the telephone network …. the auto industry was built in Cleveland and Detroit. At least these people’s parents and grandparents, and great-grandparents, somehow had the wherewithal to build all of these amazing things … What is happening on the blank spot of the map?
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We have been in a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skilled immigration has been funneling foreigners into. And so it turns out, it’s not a victim-free thing. There is a 100-percent chance of victims. Because why? There’s only so many education slots, there’s only so many of these jobs, right? You know, Google only hires so many Level Seven engineers, right?
Breitbart News has repeatedly described how investors use migration to consolidate jobs and wealth in a few regions, regardless of the damage done to most states and congressional districts.
Andreesen also noted that the United States is damaging other countries by deliberately extracting their clever and credentialed people instead of helping those people create mutually beneficial trade routes:
We are brain-draining the world … [yet] the one thing that we know to be the height of absolute evil that the West ever did was colonization and resource extraction, right?
We know the height of absolute evil was when the Portuguese and the English and everybody else went and had these colonies, and then went in and we took all the oil and we took all the diamonds, or we took all the lithium or whatever it is, right?
Well, for some reason, we realize that that’s a deeply evil thing to do when it’s a physical resource, when it’s a non-conscious physical matter. And some reason, it gets completely morally acceptable to do it with human capital.
In fact, we think it’s glorious and beautiful and wonderful, and the great flowering of peace and harmony and moral justice of our time to do it, and we don’t think for one second what we’re doing to the countries that we’re pulling all these people out of.
Maybe we’re just going to live in this delusional state forever, and we’ll just keep doing it, and it’ll keep benefiting us, and we just won’t care what happens.
This is one of the things 10 feet under the waterline. It is just a matter of time until people suddenly realize, “Oh my God, what are we doing?” Because, like, we need the rest of the world to succeed too, right? Like, we need these other countries to flourish. We don’t want to be the only successful country in the middle of complete chaos and disaster.
“We just extract and we extract and we extract and we don’t think about it,” he said.
Some U.S. leaders, however, are looking past the nation’s post-1990 high-migration/low-wage economic policy towards an economy built on high productivity, broad prosperity, and civic stability.
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