The H-1B visa program is draining the incentive for complacent politicians to fix the broken K-12 system used by many millions of ordinary Americans, says Daron Acemoglu, a famous economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The educated elite “has given up on the education of Americans because they think that they can fill any skill gap with importing those skills [via the H-1B program], whether they are nurses, whether they’re doctors, whether they’re programmers. That’s the problem,” Acemoglu told Tyler Cowen, a zealously pro-migration economist at George Mason University.
Acemoglu is an ethnic Armenian who used the H-1B program to migrate from Turkey to the United States.
The Nobel Prize winner told Cowan:
I would love to have skilled immigration, but I would love also to renew the … social compact of America such that the influential people, be they politicians, journalists, or tech barons, really have a commitment to the education of Americans.
Cowen rebuked him, saying: “I don’t see that,” prompting the Turkey-born immigrant Acemoglu to respond:
Well, about half of people in the United States in middle school read and write a couple of grades below [below standards, and] we’re not doing anything about that despite the fact that everybody recognizes that we are moving into the skills age where we are going to need more and more human capital. We’re not doing anything. We’re just giving up on these people. I think that is what really bothers me, that somehow we have, as the most powerful, arguably the richest, country in the world, have resigned ourselves to give up on the education of about a third to a half of the youth.
“We’re throwing money at it, but we’re not really dealing with the root causes,” Acemoglu added.
Acemoglu’s comments infuriated Adam Ozimek, another pro-migration economist who works for pro-migration investors at the pro-migration Economic Innovation Group. He posted:
If you are looking for bad Acemoglu arguments, consider his criticism of skilled immigration, that it somehow is stopping us from improving the education of the bottom half or third of students???
Ozimek’s solution to the many civic, economic, and education problems caused by the H-1B and similar programs — described here — is to create more and bigger visa programs.
In June, an Indian-born investor and H-1B advocate suggested the program could help K-12 schools by steering Indian contract workers into Silicon Valley tech jobs so that U.S. tech graduates could be freed to teach kids in Alaska: “Dear Anti-immigrants constantly crying that foreigners are taking American jobs: Why aren’t you teaching in rural Alaska?”
The globalist Economist magazine is also slamming Acemoglu amid his populist shift:
Give an economist a few drinks, however, and some of them will venture their true opinions about this giant [Acemoglu]. “Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed,” blasts one well-known economist. Some commentators do not require Dutch courage. “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade,” Noah Smith, an [pro-migration] economics blogger, has said, in response to a flurry of online criticism of Mr Acemoglu’s work.
Acemoglu’s new book, “What Happened To Liberal Democracy?” is surprisingly coy about migration’s economic impact on ordinary Americans. But on page 14, he spotlights the elite’s refusal to recognize the public’s opposition to migration: “Throughout the last several decades, about half the U.S. population has been concerned about immigration, especially illegal immigration … Mainstream politicians haven’t paid much attention to these concerns for most of this period.”
He is also shying away from mentioning immigration as he touts his new book. In an appearance on the Capitalisn’t streaming show, for example, he carefully avoided mentioning the 1924 immigration reform:
I don’t know of any example in history of sustained shared prosperity which works through anything other than sustained wage growth … That’s exactly what happened in the United States starting in early decades of the 20th century [after the 1924 immigration reform]. So much so that many companies … were sending their [hiring] agents all around the 50 states to find people that could work … because there was such a hunger for labor. It was that hunger for labor that was at the root of shared prosperity, and [the] disappearance of that hunger [is] due to technology, organizational changes, and other economic changes.
“Dems have ceased to be the workers’ party long ago, owing to their support for digital disruption, globalization, large immigrant flows, and ‘woke’ ideas,” he wrote in January 2025 after migration concerns allowed President Donald Trump to win the White House for a second time.
Acemoglu’s criticism of the H-1B program echoes the 2024 comments of another Nobel Prize-winning economist, British-born Angus Deaton, who recognized the many “Deaths of Despair” caused by government economic policies. Deaton wrote in 2024:
I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor …
I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.
Acemoglu’s comments also echoed May 2025 comments from Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen.
“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,” Andreessen told his rapt audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. He added:
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.”
For a decade, Breitbart News has carefully described the U.S. economic policy of Extraction Migration, including its impact on wages, productivity, and housing.
Breitbart News has also covered the white-collar visa-worker controversies, polls, and the civic impact as politicians subordinated citizenship to the priorities of investors and migrants.
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