MIT economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu says U.S. reliance on skilled foreign workers through programs such as H-1B has allowed political, business and media leaders to neglect persistent shortcomings in educating American children for an increasingly skills-driven economy.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist Daron Acemoglu is challenging one of the central arguments for expanding skilled immigration, contending that programs such as H-1B can reduce pressure on American leaders to address weaknesses in the nation’s K-12 education system.
Acemoglu’s argument, detailed in a Breitbart News report, is not that the United States should eliminate skilled immigration. Instead, he says policymakers have become too willing to fill labor shortages by importing workers rather than developing more American students for high-skill professions.
The educated elite “has given up on the education of Americans because they think that they can fill any skill gap with importing those skills [via the H-1B program], whether they are nurses, whether they’re doctors, whether they’re programmers. That’s the problem,” Acemoglu told economist Tyler Cowen.
Acemoglu himself came to the United States from Turkey through the H-1B program. He is ethnically Armenian and has since become one of the country’s most prominent economists.
His position centers on what he sees as a weakened social commitment to educating Americans rather than an outright rejection of immigration.
“I would love to have skilled immigration, but I would love also to renew the … social compact of America such that the influential people, be they politicians, journalists, or tech barons, really have a commitment to the education of Americans,” Acemoglu told Cowen.
Cowen responded: “I don’t see that.”
Acemoglu then pointed to academic performance among American students and argued that policymakers have effectively accepted poor outcomes at the same time the economy is becoming more dependent on advanced skills.
“Well, about half of people in the United States in middle school read and write a couple of grades below [below standards, and] we’re not doing anything about that despite the fact that everybody recognizes that we are moving into the skills age where we are going to need more and more human capital. We’re not doing anything. We’re just giving up on these people. I think that is what really bothers me, that somehow we have, as the most powerful, arguably the richest, country in the world, have resigned ourselves to give up on the education of about a third to a half of the youth.”
“We’re throwing money at it, but we’re not really dealing with the root causes,” Acemoglu added.
His comments drew opposition from economists who favor expanded immigration.
Adam Ozimek, an economist who has advocated for higher levels of immigration, criticized Acemoglu’s argument.
“If you are looking for bad Acemoglu arguments, consider his criticism of skilled immigration, that it somehow is stopping us from improving the education of the bottom half or third of students???” Ozimek wrote.
Ozimek works for the Economic Innovation Group, whose founders include prominent investors and which has published extensively on immigration policy, including analysis of H-1B program practices.
The organization has advocated substantially expanding pathways for skilled immigration through proposals for larger and additional visa programs.
The disagreement reflects a wider dispute about whether employers’ access to foreign workers complements American education and labor or reduces economic incentives to train and recruit U.S. workers.
Critics of the current system have also pointed to allegations of abuse and fraud involving employment-based visas, including a recent case involving an Indian-born investor who admitted substantial fraud connected to H-1B visas.
Supporters of skilled immigration argue that foreign workers help employers fill positions for which qualified labor is difficult to find domestically.
That argument produced a particularly pointed exchange in June when an Indian-born investor and H-1B advocate challenged critics of immigration by suggesting that foreign technology workers could fill Silicon Valley jobs while American graduates pursued other occupations.
“Dear Anti-immigrants constantly crying that foreigners are taking American jobs: Why aren’t you teaching in rural Alaska?”
The argument suggested that immigration programs could help address labor allocation by moving foreign workers into technology jobs, potentially leaving Americans available to fill shortages elsewhere, including education.
Acemoglu is moving in a different direction, arguing that abundant access to imported skilled labor can weaken the pressure that might otherwise force political and economic leaders to improve American schools.
His increasingly populist economic arguments have also attracted criticism outside the H-1B debate.
The Economist recently published a critical assessment of Acemoglu, quoting economists and commentators who question how he translates academic work into public policy.
“Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed,” one unnamed economist told the magazine.
Economics blogger Noah Smith was also quoted saying, “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade,” in response to criticism of Acemoglu’s work.
Acemoglu’s broader argument about elite institutions, workers and immigration also appears in his new book, “What Happened To Liberal Democracy?”.
On page 14, he addresses the political consequences of widespread public concern about immigration.
“Throughout the last several decades, about half the U.S. population has been concerned about immigration, especially illegal immigration … Mainstream politicians haven’t paid much attention to these concerns for most of this period.”
Acemoglu has simultaneously emphasized the importance of tight labor markets and sustained wage growth when discussing American prosperity.
During an appearance on the Capitalisn’t streaming show, he described labor scarcity as an important contributor to rising wages during the early 20th century.
“I don’t know of any example in history of sustained shared prosperity which works through anything other than sustained wage growth … That’s exactly what happened in the United States starting in early decades of the 20th century. So much so that many companies … were sending their [hiring] agents all around the 50 states to find people that could work … because there was such a hunger for labor. It was that hunger for labor that was at the root of shared prosperity, and [the] disappearance of that hunger [is] due to technology, organizational changes, and other economic changes.”
Breitbart has connected that period to the 1924 immigration restrictions and separately examined the 100th anniversary of the 1924 immigration law.
Acemoglu himself has increasingly connected immigration, globalization and technological disruption to the Democratic Party’s loss of support among workers.
“Dems have ceased to be the workers’ party long ago, owing to their support for digital disruption, globalization, large immigrant flows, and ‘woke’ ideas,” he wrote in January 2025, following President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
His evolving position has parallels with arguments made by other influential economists who previously supported liberal immigration and globalization policies.
British-born Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton, whose work has examined “Deaths of Despair,” publicly reassessed some of his earlier views on immigration and globalization in 2024.
“I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor …” Deaton wrote.
“I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.”
Similar concerns have emerged from Silicon Valley.
Investor Marc Andreessen made related arguments in comments highlighted in 2025 about opportunities available to talented American students outside elite coastal institutions.
“If you’re a family… where I grew up [Wisconsin], and you’ve got a smart kid, and you think you’re going to get them into a top university in this country… there is no chance,” Andreessen said at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.
“What level of untapped talent exists in this country that a combination of DEI and immigration have basically cut out of the loop for the last 50 years? And how long can we have this story to everybody in the Midwest and the South that says, ‘Sorry, because of historical oppression, your kids are SOL.’”
Acemoglu’s criticism places K-12 education at the center of the skilled-immigration debate.
His argument is that employers’ ability to recruit nurses, doctors, programmers and other skilled workers internationally can alleviate immediate labor shortages while simultaneously reducing the political urgency to prepare more Americans for those jobs.
Supporters of expanded skilled immigration reject that connection and argue that the United States can improve domestic education while continuing to recruit talent from abroad.
The dispute ultimately concerns how the country responds to an economy requiring increasing levels of technical knowledge and human capital: whether imported skills primarily supplement the domestic workforce or whether easy access to those workers can also weaken incentives to develop talent already living in the United States.
For Acemoglu, the failure to educate large numbers of American children is the larger problem. His stated goal is not to end skilled immigration, but to restore what he describes as a national commitment among politicians, journalists, business leaders and other influential institutions to ensuring Americans themselves are prepared for the jobs of a more skills-intensive economy.
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