By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday called for increased immigration, insisting “we need more people, especially with AI coming.”
“We’re going to let a lot of people come in, because we need more people, especially with AI coming and all the different things,” Trump said. “And the farmers need, everybody needs but we’re going to make sure they’re not murderers and drug dealers.”
Trump’s position on AI puts him to the left of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
Fink, who has spent years pushing open borders and mass immigration onto America, told the World Economic Forum earlier this year that “xenophobic” countries with “declining populations” may actually be the “big winners” in a future dominated by AI and robotics.
“I can argue in the developed countries the big winners are countries that have shrinking populations,” [Fink said at the WEF in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia].
“We always used to think shrinking population is a cause for negative growth, but in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in, shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology.
“And if the promise, and it’s going to happen, if the promise of all of that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living of countries, the standard of living of individuals, even with shrinking populations.”
[…] “The paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing, and the social problems that one will have in substituting humans for machines is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations,” said Fink.“For those countries that have rising populations, the answer will be education — for those countries that do not have a foundation of rule of law or education, that’s where the divide’s going to get more and more extreme,” he added.
In June, the New York Times reported that Trump had “strikingly softened his language about immigration” during a private meeting in Washington with “a group of America’s most powerful chief executives.”
Just days later, Trump told a group of tech execs that he wants to dramatically expand immigration by “automatically” giving out green cards to anyone who graduates from any college in America.
“You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges too,” Trump told the All-In podcast. “We need brilliant people.”
A recent study found that “the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points” — all this policy would do is encourage more diploma mills.
Trump’s campaign walked back his comments after widespread backlash on social media but it’s clear Trump himself hasn’t changed his views.
Trump’s own statements, combined with his flip-flopping on immigration and putting Jared Kushner in charge of securing the border during his first term, makes it really hard to believe he will actually follow through on his campaign pledge of “mass deportations.”