America Is Mispricing Human Capital

Sergey Brin came to the US in 1979 as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union. At the time, this was a humanitarian gesture. But in retrospect, it was quite a consequential strategic investment the U.S. government made. His family was admitted under a Cold War–era refugee framework that explicitly prioritized and fast-tracked defectors from communist regimes.

High-skill talent is not just a supplement to the American economy; it is the primary engine of its growth. Between 1990 and 2020, skilled immigration accounted for roughly 30% to 50% of the aggregate productivity growth in the United States.[^1] For every 100 foreign-born workers with STEM degrees, an additional 262 jobs are created for U.S.-born workers.[^2] Immigration policy directly informs the management of America's most critical capital.

Immigration is not merely an administrative act; it is also an equity investment. In practice, this makes the federal government a venture capital allocator—one that has recently begun systematically de-risking its portfolio.

The Three Portfolios of Human Capital

Any capital allocator understands that returns come from a portfolio, not a single bet. Yet U.S. immigration policy increasingly treats talent as a monolith. In reality, there are three distinct classes of prospective immigrants, each corresponding to a different investment profile.

1. Refugees: The Deep-Value Contrarians

Refugees fleeing instability are the deep-value investments of immigration policy. They arrive with little capital, but extreme upside. History is unambiguous here: Albert Einstein, Andrew Grove, and Sergey Brin all entered the United States not as high earners, but as displaced individuals escaping hostile regimes.

Refugee admissions during the Cold War were not merely humanitarian; they were strategically opportunistic.

2. Wealthy Immigrants: The Scaled Entrants

These are the individuals who arrive with both resources and the capacity to build frontier companies at scale. Masayoshi Son, for example, immigrated to the United States with capital and went on to deploy it into technology firms that reshaped global communications, e-commerce, and robotics.

In fact, this is the one immigration lane the U.S. has actively optimized. Trump's "million-dollar visa" explicitly prioritizes this cohort. Capital is legible, immediate, and politically defensible, making wealthy immigrants easy to price and justify.

3. Middle- and Low-Income Immigrants: The Pre-Product Founders

The most misunderstood category is the middle-class or poor immigrant—the pre-product founder. These individuals lack capital and credentials but possess the highest potential for optionality. They are the 22-year-olds with nothing but time, ambition, and risk tolerance. Wage-weighted visa selection systematically excludes them by design.

By the time Andrew Grove could command a large salary, he had already built the foundations of Intel. The American advantage was always the cheap call option.

A System That Misprices All Three

The policy failure is not that the U.S. favors one group over another—it is that it misprices all three simultaneously.

  • Refugees are treated as fiscal liabilities rather than asymmetric bets. During the Cold War and immediate post–Cold War period, the United States routinely admitted over 100,000 refugees per year, including 122,000 in 1990 alone. By comparison, refugee admissions collapsed to historic lows in the early 2020s—falling to roughly 11,000 admissions in both 2020 and 2021, the lowest levels since the modern refugee program began.[^3]

  • Wealthy immigrants are welcomed—and perhaps explicitly courted—but this focus risks absorbing disproportionate political and bureaucratic attention, crowding out investment in the earlier-stage human capital that generates the deepest long-term growth.

  • Middle- and lower-income talent is excluded outright by wage thresholds and cost barriers that mistake present salary for future value. The proposed $100,000 "Luxury Visa" fee for H-1B petitions makes this explicit. Big Tech can absorb the fee; startups, labs, and first-time founders cannot.

A venture fund that behaved this way would collapse. It would miss the contrarians, overpay for late-stage assets, and never seed the next generation of founders. That is exactly the position the United States is drifting toward now.

America did not win the 20th century by selecting for safety or salary. It won by assembling the world's most aggressive, risk-tolerant human capital portfolio. Immigration was not merely charity. It was the most successful talent acquisition strategy ever devised.

The net effect is that the United States has begun to export its most valuable strategic asset—the innovator.

The stakes are existential for GDP growth. Immigrants have started more than half (55%) of America's "unicorn" startups.[^4] In the crucial field of AI, roughly 70% of the top-tier researchers working in the U.S. are foreign-born.[^5] By treating these individuals as a burden to be managed rather than an investment opportunity, the US is destroying our own talent pool. What was once a compounding advantage is now actively contested, and in growing pockets, lost.

Citations

[^1]: Peri, Giovanni, Kevin Shih, and Chad Sparber. "STEM Workers, H-1B Visas, and Productivity in U.S. Cities." Journal of Labor Economics 33, no. S1 (2015): S225–S255. [^2]: Made­leine Zavodny, "Immigration and American Jobs," American Enterprise Institute & Partnership for a New American Economy (Dec. 15, 2011) [^3]: Office of Homeland Security Statistics, Table 13. Refugee Arrivals: Fiscal Years 1980 to 2024 (showing annual refugee arrival figures such as 122,070 in FY 1990 and 11,454 in FY 2021 and 11,840 in FY 2020) [^4]: National Foundation for American Policy, Immigrant Entrepreneurs and U.S. Billion-Dollar Companies (NFAP Policy Brief, 2022) [^5]: National Foundation for American Policy, Immigrants and Billion-Dollar AI Companies (NFAP Policy Brief, 2023)