Andrew McAfee: Immigration Reform Is Key to Our Economic Future
April 17, 2015
By Andrew McAfee
Our series on The Good Economy of 2040 continues with MIT’s Andrew McAfee. To build a better economy over the next 25 years, McAfee says, we’ll need a more open immigration system that welcomes skilled workers. “When the world’s most talented, ambitious, tenacious, capable people want to come here and build their lives and their careers…it absolutely makes no sense to me that we put all these ridiculous Kafkaesque barriers in their way.”
To read more about skilled immigration, check out the following articles:
Getting a Visa Took Longer Than Building Instagram, Says Immigrant Co-Founder (Bloomberg)
The basics of the US immigration system (Vox)
Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at MIT and cofounder of its Initiative on the Digital Economy, where he studies how computer technologies are changing business, the economy, and society. His 2014 book on these topics, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson), has been both a New York Times and Wall Street Journal top ten bestseller. He writes two blogs, academic papers, and articles for publications including Harvard Business Review, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He’s talked about his work on The Charlie Rose Show and 60 Minutes, and at TED and the Aspen Ideas Festival. McAfee was educated at Harvard and MIT.