Tyler Cowen Publishes 'A Conservative Case for Liberal Immigration' in The Free Press
Key Takeaways
- •Cowen published the essay "A Conservative Case for Liberal Immigration" in The Free Press and introduced it in an August 15, 2026 post on Marginal Revolution.
- •The excerpt argues that the United States leads the AI industry and uses AI models as a form of soft power.
- •Cowen highlights immigrant backgrounds among major AI figures, including Dario Amodei, Geoffrey Hinton, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba.
- •The essay cites the Global AI Talent Tracker by MacroPolo, which reports that 38% of published AI researchers studied undergraduate in China and that 72% of them work in the United States.
- •The discussion is framed around the long-running policy debate over U.S. firms hiring foreign-born scientists and engineers, including through H-1B visas.
Economist Tyler Cowen has published a new essay, "A Conservative Case for Liberal Immigration," in The Free Press, the outlet founded in 2021 by former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss. Cowen introduced the piece in an August 15, 2026 post on Marginal Revolution, the economics blog he has co-written with Alex Tabarrok since 2003, and offered readers an excerpt centered on the AI industry, which he describes as an area where the United States leads the world and deploys its AI models as an instrument of soft power.
The excerpt highlights the immigrant backgrounds of several prominent figures in artificial intelligence:
"Or look at the AI revolution, another area where America is leading the world and also using its AI models to exert soft power. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has an Italian father, neural-network pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is originally from the U.K., and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who helped initially fund and found OpenAI, are from South Africa and Germany, respectively. OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba is from Poland. Musk and Thiel, of course, have other achievements to their credit as well. A significant portion of the employees at the major labs are Chinese. In one survey of published AI researchers, 38 percent received their undergraduate education in China, and 72 percent of those are working in the U.S."
Hinton, whom the essay calls a neural-network pioneer, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks. The survey of published AI researchers cited in the essay is the Global AI Talent Tracker from MacroPolo (archived project), produced by the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank and widely cited in discussions of where AI researchers train and where they work. Such figures speak to a policy debate in which the ability of U.S. labs and technology firms to hire foreign-born scientists and engineers, often through programs such as the H-1B specialty-occupation visa, has long been contested.
Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He recommends that readers consult the full essay at The Free Press.
