The government would gain by supercharging the inflow of migrants just as millions of American voters lose their jobs and careers to artificial intelligence, says Silicon Valley investor and AI advocate Jason Calacanis.
“The best interest of America today, when it comes to expansion, is very simple … Recruit the smartest and most driven 1-3m people on the planet every year,” Calacanis wrote May 25 on X, without mentioning the impact on the prosperity of ordinary Americans.
The government should also import many additional foreign workers for healthcare and other white-collar jobs, he said. “Allow for a modest number of worker visas based on our acute needs … This is probably 100-500k [migants] a year on average,” he wrote. He did not explain whether the term “our acute needs” refers to the needs of government, investors, or citizens.
Americans will accept the bigger inflow of legalized migrants if the current inflow of illegals is kept at zero, he suggested: “of course cut off all illegal immigration to accomplish this.”
But in August, Calacanis promised a job apocalypse as AI and robots would push millions of American families and youths out of jobs, such as drivers. He told TheBulwark.com:
What happens if all [human] drivers go away? Well, every self-driving car is four full-time jobs, and every humanoid robot in a factory is five jobs, maybe six, because those jobs [humans] can only can work maybe seven hours as a just physical limitation….
Those are going to be here, folks. Before 2030 you’re gonna see Amazon, which has massively invested in this, replace all factory workers and all drivers … It will be 100 percent robotic, which means all of those workers are going away. Every Amazon worker– all those jobs, UPS gone, FedEx gone. All of those are going to be gone, and those companies will be more profitable, and when you order something, it’s going to come faster and cheaper and better, and your Uber will be half as much.
But somebody needs to retrain these people [for new jobs]. That’s actually a very valid fear that technologists will tell somebody like you, “Don’t worry about it, there’ll just be more jobs created!” The question is, what happens to those people who get caught in the gap?
We had this happen [during] the industrial revolution that happened over 40 years, 50 years. The agricultural revolution was multi-decade. This one will happen in a decade, and so it would be very different, and yeah, you should be concerned.
Calacanis describes himself as a moderate among his peers. His demand for both government support of job-killing AI and government support for more American-replacing migration is echoed by other green-eyeshade investors who are shrugging off the rising public anger about stalled wages, declining jobs, high housing costs, and chaotic diversity.
However, Calacanis ignores the many polls that show rising public alarm at AI, mass migration, and white-collar visa programs.
In contrast, President Donald Trump and his deputies see those polls and argue that AI and migration are alternative strategies for economic growth. “We’re going to need robots… to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” Trump told Breitbart News in August 2025, adding:
We’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically… Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself.
“When you guys graduate from this university, I don’t want you competing against a low-wage foreigner for your first job,” Vice President JD Vance told students in April, adding:
I want a company to have to pay you a fair wage for a fair day’s work. It’s common sense. But to do that, you really have to do reform of the H-1B and other… visa systems.
Democrats, in contrast, prefer the combination of mass migration and greater taxes because it would dramatically expand the Democratic Party’s welfare machine for sidelined, surplus Americans and migrants. On May 19, for example, California Governor Gavin Newsom told a Democratic meeting:
The system’s broken. It’s broken, folks. 10 percent of people own two-thirds of the wealth, the same 10 percent own 93 percent of the value of the stock market. [A] A 30-year-old is not doing better than her father for the first time in history. That is a five-alarm fire …
We saw with all the populism and authoritarianism that came from that because of our lousy trade deals … we ain’t see nothing yet, because now it’s the blue collar worker that sounds a lot like 25-year-old white collar workers that I see in San Francisco that are wondering why they’re not getting a call back on a job interview. They’re sounding the same. That’s a different kind of coalition, the white collar and blue collar coalition.
Each year, as almost 4 million young Americans take their first jobs, Congress makes their careers difficult by admitting roughly 1 million legalized migrants. Congress also welcomes roughly 600,000 new white-collar foreign contract workers — carrying F-1/OPT, H-1B, J-1, H4EAD, or L-1 work permits and visas — for the salaried jobs needed by roughly 800,000 new American college grads.
Since 1990, this government policy of flooding the labor and real estate markets has shifted vast wealth from ordinary employees to welfare-aided migants, older homeowners, and to Wall Street investors, such as Calacanis and his peers.
Some investors are trying to evade, dismiss, or downplay the political threat of high-tech jobs losses alongside Congress’s current inflow of legalized migrants. the chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, wrote in a May 22 op-ed for the New York Times, titled “I’m the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs: The A.I. Job Apocalypse Is Overblown”:
In conversations with hundreds of business leaders over the past few months, I’ve seen a sharp divide in their views of artificial intelligence. One camp sees a “job apocalypse” and mass unemployment ahead; the other sees a great leap forward for society.
Put me in the second camp — with a few caveats.
Solomon continued:
Goldman Sachs’s economists estimate that, over the next decade, A.I. may automate 25 percent of current work hours … According to one Stanford study, in the occupations most susceptible to greater automation, such as software engineering or customer service, entry-level employment has already declined by 16 percent relative to the least-exposed roles.
…
If A.I. does indeed destroy jobs — and at a potentially greater speed than we’ve seen — then public policy must respond, by funding large-scale reskilling or encouraging A.I. that supports workers instead of replacing them.
Solomon did not mention the government’s option of touting AI while also reducing foreign migration into Americans’ jobs.
Newsom, some investors and pundits say that billionaire investors should recognize an impending crisis.
“The pitchforks, yeah, they’re here, they’re not just coming,” said Newsome, who is widely expected to run for the president in 2028 with much financial support from California’s tech sector.
Read the full article here