“We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” he told Breitbart News, adding:
We don’t enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient … we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically—it’s going to be robotically … It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself … we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.
July data showing a drop in the number of working migrants is welcome news, Trump told CNBC on August 5. “That’s a great number because it means we’re putting Americans to work.”
Trump’s comments sketch a possible new economic strategy, said Mark Krikorian, founder of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
I don’t think they’ve gotten to the point of talking about robotics and AI as a substitute for migration … This is something that it would behoove the administration to present in a more rigorous and thought-out way where they actually connect the dots and explain what it is they have in mind.
Our whole debate needs to get away from this “Legal [immigration] good/illegal [immigration] bad” dichotomy and talk about how the large-scale importation of foreign labor, whether it’s legal or illegal, whether it’s permanent or temporary, affects future productivity in a negative way.
[The productivity alternative] provides voters with an understanding of why we should be enforcing the immigration law: Why do we want less illegal immigration? Yes, it’s illegal, obviously. And yes, some of them are criminals, but most of them aren’t …. We need to do this [enforcement] precisely because it will lead to higher productivity down the road with these advances in robotics and AI.
Trump’s emphasis on robots reflects chatter in elite circles about the need to grow the economy and prosperity via productivity. If enacted, it would be a big shift from the post-1990 policy of inflating the stock market by extracting workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries.
The promise of cheap labor is ” a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,” Vice President JD Vance told an audience of Silicon Valley investors in May. He added:
And whether we’re offshoring factories to cheap labor economies, or importing cheap labor through our immigration system, cheap labor became the drug of Western economies. And I’d say that if you look in nearly every country, from Canada to the UK that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you’ve seen productivity stagnate. That’s not a total happenstance. I think that the connection is very direct.
“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at a 2024 pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:
That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …
If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations.
Some leaders in Western countries are recognizing the need to grow productivity, not foreign populations. That relook is being accelerated by the growing scale of crimes, corruption, and civic conflict caused by the migrant inflows.
On July 23, Trump signed a national AI strategy and told his audience of investors:
Perhaps most importantly, winning the AI race will demand a new spirit of patriotism and national loyalty in Silicon Valley and long beyond Silicon Valley.
For too long, much of our tech industry pursued a radical globalism that left millions of Americans feeling distrustful and betrayed. And you know that, everybody knows that, everybody in this room certainly does. Many of our largest tech companies have reaped the blessings of American freedom while building their factories in China, hiring workers in India and slashing profits in Ireland. You know that. All the while dismissing and even censoring their fellow citizens right here at home. Under President Trump those days are over.
We need US technology companies to be all in for America. We want you to put America first. You have to do that. That’s all we ask.
But Trump’s strategy faces huge obstacles, including the demand by the investors in Fortune 500 companies for a greater inflow of cheap foreign white-collar workers. So far, Trump’s deputies have just a few curbs on the legalized white-collar migration.
The inflow keeps at least 1.5 million foreign graduates in U.S. jobs, and pushes many American STEM, business, and healthcare graduates out of the middle class, and away from entrepreneurship and management careers. The migration inflow also helps the corporate directors to shift more investment and middle-class jobs back to India, regardless of the damage to professionalism, innovation, and national security.
Investor groups and their progressive allies say they favor a policy that maximizes both productivity and migration, especially of Indian workers. But their advocates ignore the abundant evidence that migration reduces productivity while also expanding chaotic diversity and government spending.
Major media outlets are also eager to hide any alternatives to migration, or even recognition of the economic costs of migration. For example, the editorial board at Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post argued on August 5 in favor of allowing illegal migrants to stay in the agriculture sector: “This frontal attack [by ICE] on farmers must end … They need relief from overregulation and excessive immigration enforcement.”
Bezos owns Amazon.com, which gains from any inflow of foreign consumers into the U.S. economy.
But Trump’s talk of robots may help inquisitive reporters describe the strategic choice, said Krikorian. “You need to give them the outline for them to write about it [because] you can’t expect most of them to be connecting the dots.”
In another corner of U.S. politics, Trump is also trying to deliver manual-labor migrants to the GOP’s important farm-sector interest group. “Well, we want to take care of our American workers first and foremost, and that’s what we’re doing,” Trump told Breitbart News when he was asked about proposals to import more workers for the farm sector. “We also want to help our farmers because our farmers are producing like never before. We have to help them, and we’re working out some very complicated strategies and language.”
“We can’t let our farmers not have anybody,” Trump told CNBC, adding:
You know, these are very these people, they’re you can’t replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried, we’ve tried. Everybody tried. They don’t do it. These people do it naturally, naturally. I said, what happens if they get it to a farmer the other day, what happens if they get a bad back? He said, they don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die. I said that’s interesting, isn’t it?
Agriculture Secretary Rollins is talking up the need for greater automation in the farm sector, which is facing growing competition from low-wage countries.
Congress has avoided the debate, but a growing number of GOP politicians are joining the productivity-beats-migration view.
“They’re laying off all these American workers and then they’re importing H-1B visa people to work for cheaper,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said July 28. ” I think that’s a total scam,” he said. “Is that good policy for us as a country to have Americans put out of work and then to bring in H-1B [visa workers]?”
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