Marc Andreessen: How Mass Immigration is Destroying the Working Class

00:00So I want to circle back to another controversial topic which you know over the last several decades you mentioned this we've kind of pursued de-industrialization financialization. Uh we've also pursued mass immigration and you know that the view from the tech world has almost always been we need more of the smartest people to come here and build with us. A lot of my smartest friends are immigrants and they've built great things. Uh but at the same time some of this mass immigration has really affected the working class in certain ways that's that's maybe not great. I know your views have evolved on this topic like what is the right immigration policy and how does it tie into what what you're seeing for the next few

00:31decades. >> Yeah. So separate it you know the classic split between so-called highkl and lowkilled immigration. Um so on the low skill immigration side it's it's it's it's the it's the it's actually the the a lot of the AI doomers kind of have this split personality where they're like AI is going to eliminate all the jobs and we need to import another 100 million people from the third world as fast as possible or we won't have any you So, so, so there's a bit of a there's a bit of a a weird kind of disconnect I think in the logic and the logic on that. Um, you know, look, the country went through this before, you know, as I said earlier, the there was very high immigration between like 1870, 1920, you know, they

01:03closed the gates in 1925. Um, and you know, look, 1925 to 1977, you could argue it would have grown faster with higher immigration, but they grew a lot faster than we've grown, right? And so I like I do think there is this like if if you have advanced if you have AI, if you have advanced high productivity growth, if you have lots of robots running around, you know, I do think there is a question of exactly how much low lowkilled labor you need in the country, which which which bears on a lot of the the immigration debates. Um the high skilled immigration debate is is the one that's coming. Um and it's not really top of mind right now, but it's the one that's coming. And the reason it's coming is because I mean look, we you

01:36know, we need we need talent of course to build all the AI, build all the robots, and do all these things. and and you see this in, you know, the debates around the universities, you know, with the move that the administration is doing on on foreign students and so forth. And there's this kind of very one-sided argument that's happening on that right now, which is you kind of need unlimited, you know, you need limited high skill immigration from the rest of the world or you're not going to have like the smart people building stuff here. U and I would say, you know, look, like Joe, you know, our portfolio at our firm is like the United Nations. It's founders from 100 countries. You know, I I benefited enormously by

02:05working in a place characterized by very high high skilled immigration. Um the the thing that's really coming to roots though is sort of this this fundamental issue which kind of nobody wants to talk about but I've started to talk about which is it's it's the intersection of DEI and and immigration that has really I think warped I think our perceptions on high immigration over the last 50 years um which basic and you and you see this by the way in like this you just you look at like the foreign enrollment rates of the top universities which went from you know like two or three or 4% 50 years ago to whatever 27 or 30 or 50 >> Columbia is over half right 70% or whatever. ever it is. And so there's

02:39been this massive transformation in who gets educated. Um, and then there's been this massive transformation of who gets admitted through de through affirmative action and then you know as we now know at DEI um and and again this goes straight to the political divide in the country which is if you're a family you know if you if you're a family if you're parents of a kid where I grew up um and you've got a smart kid um and you think you're going to get them into you know a top university in this country like you are fooling yourself like there is no chance right um because they've got their well [laughter] the top universities basically the top universities have basically admissions program that looks like this it's like

03:11DEI for white people um which is the donors and all the fake sports right um and so >> a lot of fake sports >> like I have a friend who got into Yale to play varsity croquet um [laughter] which let me just say is not a sport that we played a lot in rural Wisconsin and then you've got you know DEI generally for for the other groups and then you've got this you got this immigration influx um and as a consequence of that like it is nearly impossible uh for somebody coming from like a Midwestern or rural background or southern background um to get into the US by the way this doesn't just affect white people this also So obviously now we now see how it's affecting Jewish people. Um it it but it actually also

03:44affects African-Americans uh in a very interesting way which is actually uh both the universities and the corporate employers are literally this is true. They're literally they literally import Africans so that they don't have to hire African-Americans um because they they they still count as black. Um there was a great story the thing that woke me up to this there was a story in the New York Times 20 years ago about Harvard's this is a Harvard admits you know black students but which ones back when the New York Times could talk about these things honestly. Um, and it quoted actually Henry Lewis Gates and Lonnie Guineer at the time uh at Harvard Law School basically observing that African-Americans were not benefiting

04:14from affir affirmative action because Harvard had figured out that they could import Nigerians. Um, right. And again, it's just like great, the Nigerians are great, they're very smart, they're very productive, it's fantastic, you know, all other things being equal, you'd like to have as many of them in your country, but like is that really why we're doing, you know, the set aside programs? Um and so like there is this really fundamental question which is like 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. Um and how long can we have this you know story to everybody in the Midwest and the South that says you know sorry you're

04:46you know because of historical oppression your kids are so >> this this is the angry populism people are worried about that's affecting our politics. >> Yeah. This is what I've really come to this is what I've really come to appreciate from growing up in the one place and now being in the other place, which is if you if you're if you're in the 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. Um and and like that that that's just such a toxic that's just such a toxic dynamic. Like that that's a very very bad thing for that to continue.