Hanania’s Plea For “High-Skilled” Immigration Would Simply Displace A Better Class Of Americans
Richard Hanania, who Wikipedia describes as an “American political science researcher and right-wing online personality” has written a Substack apologia for the importation of high-skilled, high IQ, “ambitious” immigrants that he likes to refer to as “Elite Human Capital:”
High-Skill Immigration as the Ultimate Progress Issue
There is no version of technofuturism that doesn't appreciate Elite Human Capital
August 7, 2025
Hanania himself, who I admit is a very clever fellow, is of Palestinian Christian and Jordanian descent, and is in America as a result of his family’s post-1965 immigration.
Arab Christian immigration to America is something of a mixed bag—pictured: Lebanese-Mexican actress Salma Hayek and Robert F. Kennedy Sr’s killer Sirhan Bashir Sirhan:
Hanania’s Substack post is shorter version of High-Skilled Immigration Is Key to America’s Success, HumanProgress.org, August 7, 2025.
His claim is that the Trump administration, in attempting stem the flow of mass legal immigration:
has taken us backward on what is arguably the most important issue from an enhanced-growth perspective: openness toward high-skilled immigration.
Human capital—the skills, knowledge, and health of workers—is increasingly the engine of productivity growth, far more so than natural resources or physical inputs. In his 2008 book Triumph of the City, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser shows how American cities have risen or fallen over the past several decades according to their ability to serve as places where smart and talented people can cluster together. Our great industries are built on conglomerations of talent in different locales: tech in Boston and San Francisco; finance in New York City; entertainment in Los Angeles. College towns throughout the country play a similar role on a smaller scale.
And since only a minority of the talent in the world belongs to people born in the United States, immigration is necessary to make sure that the most productive workers can cluster together.
There are a number of things wrong with this immigration enthusiasm: First, Hanania assumes that high-skilled immigration always brings in those with higher IQs than native-born Americans. Second, he ignores the phenomenon of regression to the mean when it comes to IQ. Third, even if we pretend for the sake of simplicity that he is indeed importing only immigrants with high IQ, he ignores the cultural costs.
One of his points is that
According to the Indian American venture capitalist Deedy Das, of the 44 members of Meta’s recently recruited superintelligence team, who can [allegedly] earn packages of up to $100 million a year, half are from China and 75 percent are first-generation immigrants.
Das’s tweet (linked to by Hanania above) shows this chart of people with mostly strange names—even the ones that say they’re American or Australian—in column one.
National origins are in column two, and at the far right, columns about education that show that many of these presumptive geniuses got their undergraduate degrees overseas (Peking, Tsinghua, Zheijang) did their graduate studies at Stanford and Princeton—and stayed in America to displace American workers from tech jobs, the way they displaced them from graduate school.
The fact that they all got hired for these plum jobs isn’t necessarily proof of genius— It’s been frequently noted that when immigrants head IT departments, college programs and corporations, they tend to hire people from their home countries.
It’s the kind of “disparate impact” that when it favors white Americans is considered proof of discrimination by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Note that skilled Indian immigration is from specific castes, and a large part of India’s population does not make good immigrants at all. A friend writes: “India is jam packed with 1.5 billion people, tens of millions of whom flood out of their universities every year. India is also an economically stagnant low employment dung heap.”
Of course, Hanania admits that it’s difficult to know in advance how successful an immigrant will be, but insists even the modestly successful will in theory improve conditions in America:
"Elon Musk wouldn’t have gotten in, and neither would Jensen Huang’s parents. The point is that if you accept large amounts of people who are slightly above average, some percentage of them and their children will turn out to make absolutely massive contributions to society.
What about those who don’t? Well, those migrants will simply improve national IQ and contribute to the country in more mundane ways, helping create a safer nation and higher living standards. God forbid!“
Well, even if they did, who would they be creating a “safer nation and higher living standards” for? It’s been known for years that any economic benefits of immigration are captured by the immigrants themselves—the rest being captured by Big Business and owners of capital generally, who under Hanania’s program will also be immigrants.
“And if you think they’re going to shift the politics of the country in a negative direction, that is a ridiculously speculative argument."
Au contraire! Indian and Chinese immigrants have already shifted the politics of the US in a “negative direction”—partly by supporting more mass immigration, party by supporting more leftist policies. Even Republican Indian-Americans aren’t necessarily beneficial: Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley are both foreign war and immigration advocates.
"The economic based restrictionist arguments are pure lump of labor fallacy. You don’t “help” Americans or any other group of people by hindering scientific and technological progress."
This is a “progress is always good” fallacy. Importing Chinese students (loyal to the PRC) doesn’t help the millions of Americans who can’t afford rent, healthcare, and so forth because of mass immigration.
The American Medical Association and Congress control the number of people who can go to medical school in America—and then replaces potential American doctors with foreigners. Many people don’t know about this, so here are the basic details:
In the 25 years from 1980 to 2005 the US population increased by 70 million, but the number of MD graduates from US medical schools remained static at approximately 16,000 per year,1 and the number of first-year positions in US residency programs increased to 23,000.2 The residency positions not filled by US MD graduates were filled by international medical graduates and osteopathic graduates. The number of international medical graduates in US residency programs doubled from 11,424 in 1980 to 22,419 in 2000.3 The percentage of IMGs in the US physician workforce increased to 25% in 2006.3
Why did the US increase its dependence on imported physicians to deliver health care to Americans? It was not due to a lack of US applicants to medical schools. The number of applicants for the 16,000 first-year positions in US allopathic (MD) medical schools ranged from 26,702 in 1989 to 46,965 in 1997.4 Thousands of US applicants were rejected because US allopathic medical school enrollment did not increase.
The Moratorium on US Medical School Enrollment, from 1980 to 2005: What Were We Thinking?, by James E. Dalen, MD, MPH, The American Journal of Medicine, February 2008
Hanania goes on:
Is there any good argument against high-skill immigration? Not one that I can see that can be made by anyone who is intelligent, honest, and doesn’t prioritize their prejudices over the well being of their country and humanity. If regular Americans don’t like the idea of elites who don’t look like them, I think they’ll get over it when Elite Human Capital cures their diabetes, baldness, and erectile dysfunction.
This is an offensive form of argument—if all the people who agree with Hanania are “intelligent, honest” and don’t “prioritize their prejudices” then those of us who disagree must be stupid, dishonest, and bigoted, as well as, presumably, fat, bald and impotent. However, if “Elite Human Capital” can find pills to cure these last three, they can do so in Peking or Calcutta, and send us the recipe.
There are people who would rather see their grandmother waste away from Alzheimer’s than have to look at more brown faces. If they rarely admit that this is the tradeoff we face, it is due to motivated reasoning. There is no coherent way to accept the reality of IQ and the importance of market forces, and also not be an enthusiastic champion of unlimited high-skill immigration.
I am an enthusiastic believer in the reality of IQ, but I also believe in national character—that people from different nations behave differently. For example, China’s notoriously elevated IQ is frequently attributed to the eugenic effects of thousands of years of competitive examination leading to high-IQ people being successful and passing on their genes. But in 2021 I wrote a blog post titled Chinese IQ Is Real, But So Is Their Thousand-Year Tradition Of Exam Cheating
And of course, this cheating is still going on—but in America as well as China.
Tiger Parents Riot In China: "No Fairness If You Do Not Let Us Cheat."
Chinese Cheating And The SAT Scandal: The Global Tong War Over Test Scores
Shanghai's PISA Test Scores Aren't Meaningless, But May Involve Some Cheating
As for immigrant scientists curing Alzheimer’s, one of the things immigrant scientists are notable for is fake science. A lot of Alzheimer’s research for the last 20 years has been apparently going down a dead end based on a now-retracted “controversial 2006 Nature paper, "A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory" by an immigrant scientist named Sylvain Lesné, a not-particularly-brown French immigrant from Luc-sur-Mer in Normandy.
But of course most of the immigrants committing scientific fraud aren’t French. They’re from—national character again—parts of the world where fraud is more common. See Indian Diversity Superstars And The Cancer Of Dishonesty At The Heart Of American Medical Research.
The bottom line is that that while IQ is real (and means that not only will immigrants from Somalia and the Congo be a net loss to the American taxpayer, and so will their descendants), importing an Asian overclass, even if, unlike the Somalians, they pay more in taxes than they consume in government services, is also a bad idea.
They simply displace a better class of Americans.
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I agree...we do not "need", especially, so many Chinese or Indians(dot). Both countries are overpopulated so Chinese to me are desperate and Indians(dot) are beyond desperate. Putting them here is something like putting pythons and boa constrictors in the Florida Everglades . We have no defense for low trust people in what WAS a high trust society....