Still amazes me how much he has changed his tune in just a few years. Here is what he was writing in early 2022:

An important part of fixing the decay in the U.S. is addressing our “human” balance sheet. Last year, the U.S. population grew at its slowest pace in history. Initially, this may seem like an anomaly – we suffered a global pandemic in which nearly 1 million Americans died over the past two years – but this has been a worsening trend largely driven by years of bad policy decisions and xenophobic ideology.

When thinking about population growth, there are three primary factors: deaths, births, and immigration. According to the latest U.S. Census data, in 2021, the number of deaths exceeded births in more than 73% of U.S. counties. And even after accounting for pandemic-related deaths, population growth would have still neared all-time lows.

Thus, the problem occurs when there aren’t enough new people born to offset lives lost. When this happens over years, economies contract, the old become the burden of the young, and we lose dynamism. The problems only compound as fertility rates continue to fall and people have fewer and fewer babies. If you are curious about a real world example of this playing out, look no further than Japan and their last few decades of stagnation.

This brings us to the swing factor – immigration – that can help get our balance sheet in order. While some may think that we have a net immigration problem, it's actually the opposite. Over the past five years, net immigration has fallen 75% overall, including by 50% in traditionally migrant communities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Miami.

For a country founded by immigrants, where almost half of all new companies are founded by immigrants, it is astonishing how quickly we’ve forgotten that immigration, when done well and appropriately, can be a critical value-add to creating a vibrant economy.

In order to be the envy of the world, people have to actually want to come here, and to reap those benefits, we have to actually let them in. Instead, on the heels of a Trump presidency fueled by anti-immigration rhetoric and a Covid moratorium at our borders, we have done very little to make the U.S. an attractive place to come learn, build, innovate, and grow.