A case for Net Zero Immigration

How many people will it realistically take to run future America?

Elon Musk fired over 6,000 Twitter employees, which was about 80 percent of the company's workforce, starting in November 2022. He told Tucker Carlson "It turns out you don't need all that many people to run Twitter". Recently President Trump offered two million federal workers a buyout severance package to leave their jobs. What if it turns out you don’t need all that many people to run America?

At this historical juncture when America is at last taking action on unlawful migration on the one hand and on the other hand credible sources such as Goldman Sachs are predicting radical worker displacement by AI and robotics it might be an opportune time to examine what labor and immigration policies really will put America, and Americans, first. A reversal of the deindustrialization processes which have beset the country over the past fifty years (and became turbo-charged once China was ushered into the WTO in 2001) if it is to be accomplished re-industrialization will look less like Rosie the Riveter and more like Robby the Robot.

There are some, with whom the Donald Trump of the shockingly gold-festooned NYC apartment might instinctively side, who call for bigger because…better, right? Matthew Yglesias argues this case in One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Of course if it only required a mega-sized population to be successful 800 million people in India would not depend upon daily government food handouts and 1.3 billion Africans would not rely on food imports for 80 percent of their groceries. Even in China, 11 percent of the population (which translates to roughly 153 million people) are unable to afford a healthy diet. So before inviting another 666 million people to enjoy the blessings of US liberty, policy makers should best examine all the most likely future scenarios.

If America is not completely full, it’s certainly full of foreigners. A 2018 study by researchers from Yale and MIT utilized mathematical modelling and estimated that the number of undocumented immigrants could be around 22 million, nearly double previous estimates. Common sense and Fox News will tell you that the real total is likely closer to 30 million after the Biden border-free-for-all. Combine that with some 30 million legal foreign born residents/naturalized citizens and you get 60 million newcomers. If you accept the figures of perennial immigration critic Ann Coulter (author of the famously prophetic book Adios America) of 50 million illegals you get a staggering 80 million foreign born residents, fully 24 percent of the aggregate Census Bureau population.

According to most sociological studies, it typically takes around three generations for European immigrants to become fully assimilated into American culture. Therefore isn’t the case for a ten-fold increase of foreign immigrants weaker than the case for Net Zero Immigration?

The populist Swiss People’s Party which leads most polls has campaigned on a promise to cap that tiny country’s population at 10 million. Larry Fink, head of investment behemoth Blackrock has cited studies which show countries with stable or declining populations may become the world’s leaders in incorporating AI and robotics. Even in sectors where there is no shortage of potential workers such as trucking, (the number-one high paying employment for non-college American men) automation is poised to make a devastating impact. Millions of driving jobs will vanish, permanently. During 2024 autonomous taxi company Waymo successfully completed 4 million passenger rides. Human drivers cannot compete with 24/7 operation, no strikes, and lower insurance rates. That being the case does it not make sense to discover which immigration policies most benefit the shrinking and increasingly threatened middle class citizen?

During January 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that over one million foreign-born workers found a job but effectively zero net jobs accrued to native born Americans. During a time of great employment transition does it make any sense to give away “golden ticket” jobs to foreigners residing in foreign countries through programs like H1B? The median starting salary for H1B jobs at companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google is about $150,000 but the opportunities for jumpstarting a person’s career and family life are incalculable. Here’s a question: what jobs absolutely positively cannot be filled by native born Americans or even any of the 60 million foreign-borns already here but must be filled by someone who currently lives in Mumbai or Shanghai? Can it be true native-born American’s brains have been permanently stunted from achieving excellence by 1990s TV shows as Vivek Ramaswamy recently, and perhaps unwisely, suggested?

China has no immigration program equivalent to H1B. Yet according to recent studies, China is currently considered to be ahead of the United States in several key technologies, including electric vehicles and batteries, advanced manufacturing, 5G network infrastructure, facial recognition technology, and certain aspects of artificial intelligence applications. Russia, with a GDP one tenth of America’s cannot compete for international technical talent; however the country ranked fifth in the world in terms of the number of people engaged in research and development and it is known to possess at least three hypersonic weapons systems deployed and used in active warfare with contrasts to the US total of zero.

Let us graciously disagree with Mr. Ramaswamy and consider the alternative case that there is no shortage of qualified or trainable workers in America. Let us further consider that the most practical course of development of the vast and varied landscape of the country’s economy is a steady state where a fixed number of 350 million citizens preside over an economy whose GDP growth is powered not by randomly adding foreign bodies but by the ever-increasing power and efficiency of automatons.

Will Elon Musk’s off-the-cuff prediction that there would come a point when "no job is needed" and jobs instead would be just for those who wanted one for "personal satisfaction" come true? Whatever the future holds, the concepts in the brief 2020 tome Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto are as much a dead end as Marxism for a simple reason: reality doesn’t work that way.

However…let’s fast forward to 2035: the country has a sensible skill-points and quota-based immigration plan, keeping the population stable as the nation is given time to assimilate the 60 million foreign born residents dumped into it during the previous 60 years and time to adjust to the Robot Industrial Revolution. These wise policies have not resulted in wage inflation or a labour shortage but has strongly incentivized corporate America to retrain the millions of workers displaced by AI and replace seasonal migrant labour with world-beating robotics which pick apples, cook French fries and drive 80 percent of truck and taxi trips, terrestrial and aeronautical.

Imagine Alfred Lutz, formerly employed as a Master Diesel Technician, recently retrained as a data scientist working for Walmart. Alfred makes enough money to support a politely hot stay-at-home wife and 2.6 mildly sassy but generally agreeable children. He works hard but can insist on reasonable leisure time and vacations; he is secure in the knowledge that his employer cannot just outsource his job to 2.5 H1B replacements for the same salary and no benefits. He is part of the resurgent middle class rescued in the mid-2020s by the MAGA movement.

As a flying drone limousine glides over Dallas freeways and lands him on his spacious driveway/helipad, Alfred may well reflect that the new American Dream rests on a foundation of net zero immigration and robot luxury capitalism.

---

—R.K. Syrus is a retired journalist who lives in Nevada and writes fiction including Apocalypse Israel: The 96 Hour War and the upcoming mystery: Who Killed Green Hope?