Immigration as AI Industrial Policy

Frontier AI progress is now a national industrial policy problem: corporate hiring patterns (e.g., Meta’s Superintelligence Labs dominated by foreign‑born researchers) reveal that U.S. competitiveness hinges on attracting and retaining a tiny global cohort of elite STEM talent. Absent an explicit national talent strategy that reconciles politics with capability needs, private firms will continue to offshore talent choices or concentrate capability vulnerabilities. — This reframes immigration debates as a core component of AI and economic strategy, forcing voters and policymakers to choose between restrictive politics and sustaining technological leadership.