Closed Borders Choke America’s Innovation Engine

Q: How did you come to focus on immigration?

I did not start out intending to work on immigration policy. Before Yale, I had been an entrepreneur. After Yale, I was very lucky to land a fellowship in the Obama White House in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, helping develop a policy portfolio to enable startups to achieve greater growth. I thought I’d work on access to capital or tax policy or intellectual property, but I started by doing what we now call customer discovery.

Within a matter of weeks, I realized that when you went out and said, “I’m from the federal government, how can I help on entrepreneurship and innovation?” the answer you got back over and over was, “Can you please fix immigration?” It was the most important bottleneck facing the tech and entrepreneurship world.

I worked in the Obama White House for six years. It was an incredible, high-impact experience. We did work on access to capital, tax policy, and intellectual property, but I spent a great deal of time working with the people in the White House whose actual job was immigration. I came to believe the closest thing to an economic free lunch that exists is making sure that the most talented people from around the world can apply their talents here in the United States. Immigrants have dramatically overperformed in terms of Nobel Prizes, patents, founding unicorn startups—the list goes on and on. This would be a much smaller, poorer, less dynamic country without constant inflows of newcomers from all over the world.

I also came to understand that the immigration system is incredibly complex, and immigration policy is a rollercoaster—sometimes hopeful, sometimes very demoralizing. There are many reasons for that, including the fact that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services falls under the Department of Homeland Security, making DHS the accidental regulator of global talent.

All that is to say, from my perspective, I’m still focused on enabling economic growth through science and technology entrepreneurship. And a key bottleneck is still immigration.

Q: How are you working on these issues now?

I co-direct the Talent Mobility Fund, which is part of Renaissance Philanthropy, an organization created by Tom Kalil, my former mentor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Renaissance Philanthropy uses an approach that is analogous to the venture capital model, but in a philanthropic context. It creates targeted initiatives around a thesis and time-limited goal. The equivalent of a general partner is recruited to oversee a fund built around each initiative. We have funds working on things as diverse as an AI that can teach middle-school math, a low-cost space telescope, and research into neglected climate risks.

The Talent Mobility Fund is one of the initiatives. It aims to bolster the economic dynamism and national security of the country by increasing the number of scientists and engineers arriving and staying in the United States.

As former policymakers, we have a hard-earned understanding that even perfectly crafted policy doesn’t result in everyone instantaneously understanding and utilizing the opportunities that exist. There is an immense amount of inertia in the ecosystem of law firms, universities, and employers that assist exceptionally talented individuals in moving through the immigration system. It takes a lot of reps before an immigration pathway becomes well understood and standardized. We’re trying to speed up the process of bringing existing, completely legal immigration pathways into what is familiar and standardized.

Q: Would you give an example?

There is a visa category known as the O-1A. It has been around since 1990. It is for—and I’m not making this up—“aliens of extraordinary ability .” It has two unfortunate nicknames: the genius visa and the Nobel visa.

If you are a Nobel Prize winner or a once-in-a-generation genius, you’ll have no trouble getting this visa, but neither is actually a requirement. You just have to be extraordinary. That’s a high bar, but there’s an immense amount of talent that may fall short of winning a Nobel Prize while still being demonstrably extraordinary.

In 2022, I was at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Our hypothesis was that there were extraordinary people who were not applying for O-1A visas because they were intimidated by its reputation. We recognized that the criteria for demonstrating extraordinary ability were very, very vague. So we issued clarifying guidance on the kinds of evidence that a scientist, engineer, or entrepreneur might produce to successfully meet the requirements of an O-1A visa. We hoped that providing more detailed and specific guidance would lead to more applicants. We saw that borne out while I was in the public sector.

The Talent Mobility Fund aims to significantly increase the flow of extraordinary people coming to this country through philanthropic investments in a range of startups and nonprofits that both raise the profile of this pathway and make the process easier. As one example, we funded an early-stage startup that created an O-1A screening tool where individuals provide their LinkedIn URL and within a few seconds, thanks to some nifty AI tools, get a report showing where they’re strong and where they need some work. The report is something individuals can take to an attorney and be much more empowered to understand their eligibility.

Q: Would you expand on why immigration is important to the United States?

I think that we can’t have a growing economy without more people. Period. Soon we’re going to see headlines that say the American population has plateaued or is shrinking, and people are going to be pretty stunned by that. It’s going to become self-evident that we can’t solve the country’s deficit or debt problems without a growing population. That the insolvency date for Social Security is no longer a sci-fi date far in the future but is actually very much upon us. That the only way to mitigate huge fiscal issues without cutting benefits or raising taxes is to increase the working-age population. And the only way to do that quickly is to foster orderly immigration.

The country needs people of all skill levels, not just scientists and engineers. You’d think that wouldn’t be super controversial. Until recently, a pretty standard view held by both Republicans and Democrats was, “We’ve got to secure the border but let’s also embrace legal immigration.”

But I think it’s hard to be a Republican right now and embrace that narrative. There is a faction that is currently dominant that doesn’t want to just freeze immigration at the current levels but wants to bring it as close to zero as possible. They think that “America first” means no new Americans. It’s a pretty dark time right now because the narrative that is ascendant is completely divorced from reality, fundamentally cruel, and self-destructive.

And because Democrats are in a defensive crouch right now, because they seem to think the less they talk about immigration, the better, most people are hearing only the darkest narratives. But I don’t think that will last forever.

Q: Why not?

Most Americans don’t want to entirely cut off immigration. During the Biden administration there truly were an unprecedented number of people arriving at the border. Most weren’t sneaking across; they were openly declaring themselves and claiming asylum or arriving through new legal processes designed to create more order. But it seemed very disorderly. Polling showed public sentiment towards immigrants went down and the need for increasing border security went up. And now that Trump is unleashing an indiscriminate deportation machine against law-abiding people, public opinion has returned to where it stood prior to the recent increase in border arrivals, with most Americans viewing immigration as good for our country.

Q: You mentioned that international students are viewed skeptically.

The current head of the agency where I used to work, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, bragged recently that his number one priority is eliminating Optional Practical Training for international students.

OPT is a program that’s been around for decades. It was expanded by George W. Bush. It allows someone in the country on an international student visa to stay on for one to three years after graduating as long as they are working for a company that is providing on-the-job training in their field of study. The vast majority of Americans have no issue with this program.

Not every international student wants to stay after they graduate, but for many international students, the chance to work for a few years, gain experience in the U.S., and then decide whether they want to apply for a more durable status like an H-1B or green card is a huge part of their decision to study in the U.S. at all.

Eliminating OPT would be a threat to many sectors. If you look at who employs international graduates of U.S. institutions, it’s not just tech; it’s the finance industry, it’s the auto industry, it’s the healthcare system—every company needs talented people, and this would be cutting off the supply dramatically. Ending OPT and making other forms of immigration for highly skilled workers harder would break our economic and innovation engine.

Q: Periodically, there have been efforts to do comprehensive immigration reform. The efforts failed. Why is immigration reform so hard?

Policymakers tend to smush together dozens and dozens of seemingly unrelated issues under the mantle of immigration reform. That makes it very difficult to pass anything, especially when there are hardcore restrictionists willing to lie down on the tracks and say, “Hell no.”

We came incredibly close to passing immigration reform legislation during both the George W. Bush administration in 2006 and 2007 and the Obama administration in 2013. But each bill only passed one chamber and eventually foundered. At the end of the Biden administration, a bipartisan group of senators tried to develop as narrow a proposal around immigration as you can imagine. It would have changed asylum rules and expanded funding for border security. It represented concessions that moved away from traditional Democratic positions. Most Americans, and even most Republicans and Democrats serving in Congress, know that we need a balanced set of commonsense solutions that both keep our border secure and allow for increased immigration and an avenue for long-term community members who are undocumented to get right with the law and stabilize their status. Unfortunately, hardcore restrictionists have continued to find ways to block progress on the issue.

Q: What’s the impact of not reforming the law?

When Congress does nothing, the only space for change is at the level of executive action. The result is that how the immigration system is administered changes wildly from one administration to the next. And some of those changes, I would argue, have been inconsistent with congressional intent. And real people suffer, and our communities and economy are stifled.

Q: You earned both a JD and an MBA in your time at Yale. How have the two degrees served in the policy world?

My JD has been very helpful when analyzing a regulation. But JDs are a dime a dozen in the policy world. Fewer people draw the line between an MBA and policy, so I was often the only one in the room who could build a spreadsheet. My Yale SOM training has been incredibly helpful not just when developing policy but thinking about operationalizing policy.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is an agency with a $6 billion annual budget and over 20,000 employees. That’s much larger than most private companies. The operational challenges are considerable. My Intro to Operations class at Yale SOM didn’t teach me everything I needed to know, but it gave me a toehold, some ideas of what models to use, and the questions to ask when I call experts. Frankly, it’s a lens that is not as prevalent in government as I think it should be.