Tech Billionaire Eric Schmidt is rejecting any immigration reforms that would help Americans cope with the mass layoffs being caused by Artificial Intelligence technology.

“America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to,” the tech-investor and political donor told graduates at the University of Arizona on Sunday as they booed his call for them to embrace AI:

Choose equality. Choose a diversity of perspectives… including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better.

“I can hear you, there is a fear,” he said amid loud booing.

“It’s perfectly natural that businesses want both AI to improve productivity and immigration to keep labor cheap, but as a policy matter, they need to choose one or the other,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies. “Congress needs to tell them: Choose one or the other — you don’t get both.”

BlackRock founder Larry Fink described the migration vs. AI tradeoff at a 2024 pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia.

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 — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries … for individuals, even with shrinking populations. [emphasis added]

President Donald Trump has recognized the trade-off. “We’re going to need robots… to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” he told Breitbart News in August 2025, adding:

We’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically… Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself.

In California, GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is promising to grow the economy via innovation, not immigration.

An economic strategy that helped AI by curbing migration would be a big shift from Congress’s post-1990 policy of inflating the stock market by extracting workers, consumers, renters, and government clients from poor countries.

Schmidt is one of many business advocates and investors who want Congress to keep importing more workers, renters, and consumers, yet also help them promote the AI technology that will likely lay off many American workers and impoverish many American consumers.

“It should literally be if you [are a foreigner, and] graduate from one of America’s great universities, great graduate schools, you should just get a visa stamp to your degree,” investor Ken Griffin told an audience at the May 2025 Milken Institute Global Conference.

But white-collar migration has devastated millions of American graduates, including many in Fortune 500 companies. For example, more than 1.5 million foreign temporary contract workers — not legal immigrants — hold white-collar jobs in the technology, banking, academic, and healthcare sectors. This army of mixed-skill and replaceable workers has slashed salaries, status, and promotion prospects for many additional millions of Americans, much to the benefit of Wall Street investors.

Now, the Technology threatens to rapidly sideline many additional millions of American graduates as it eliminates jobs and accelerates outsourcing to India and other developing countries.

This change is far faster than prior technologies. For example, mechanized cotton harvesting in southern states displaced almost 6 million African-Americans and 3.5 million whites over the six decades from 1990 to 1960.

The U.S. government could reduce the trauma by phasing out the million-plus visa workers that have been imported via the various visa programs, said Krikorian.

The programs include the H-1B, OPT, L-1, J-1, TN, and H4EAD visa programs. They are supplemented by white-collar migrants who have overstayed or violated their visas, such as the B-1/B-2 tourist visas.

“This would be a multi-year process,” Krikorian said, adding:

Fewer people would be let in, and people would finish their stints as H-1Bs or whatever, and so the number of white-collar visa workers wouldn’t go from a million to zero. It would go from a million to, you know, three-quarters of a million, and then half a million others would decline over time, which is a key element in the successful transition. If all of them disappeared overnight, that would be disruptive. I mean, we’d still be able to deal with it, but it would be disruptive.

Polling shows that more white-collar Americans see legalized migration and the visa programs as a big problem amid the economic pressure caused by migration and AI.

“For a couple of long, lean years, I studied software engineering from my home for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week,” one American wrote recently on his Substack column:

I nearly ended up on the street just trying to make ends meet during that time [learning to code], but I finally got there. I got my first Junior Engineer position, then another, and eventually worked my way up and pulled myself and my daughter out of poverty. For the first time in my life I was solidly middle class and didn’t have to freak out whenever I bought groceries. As someone who was on food stamps as a child, this was unimaginable success in my eyes. The peace of mind I felt knowing that if I lost a job there were 10 more for every 1 developer out there was immeasurable. I had a good run of it.

…

Speaking personally, the shift this so-called “AI revolution” has caused in a career I fought for with my blood, sweat, and tears; witnessing it become a shell of what it once was, with the looming threat of a return to poverty with no way out, has been a radicalizing moment for me. I can feel the pendulum swing above me, holding my breath and waiting, knowing that if it drops I will have nothing left to lose. This is the prevailing situation for so many of us. I can’t make any solid predictions, but I know that when you give tens of millions of people nothing to hang onto, the threadbare fabric holding society together will turn to dust. Ask Claude what happens next.

However, some billionaires are admitting the rapid economic impact of AI.

The technology is “profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago,” investor Ken Griffin said at a May 2026 event at the Stanford Business School in California:

It has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with master’s and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. These are not mid-tier white-collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being… automated by agentic AI.

“I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday, actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society,” Griffin said.

“The jobs apocalypse is not yet here,” the globalist Economist magazine warned on May 14, adding, “But if governments wait for conclusive evidence before creating a safety-net, it will be too late.”