Students Mercilessly Boo Eric Schmidt as He Lays Out Technocratic Endgame of AI and Foreigners Destroying America

Eric Schmidt, the billionaire former Google CEO and reliable Democratic donor, delivered a commencement address at the University of Arizona that laid bare the self-serving priorities of much of Silicon Valley.

While graduates voiced their fears over AI-driven job losses, Schmidt doubled down: America needs more artificial intelligence and more immigration. The message was clear—technological disruption for thee, but cheap labor to cushion the blow for us.

This is not a coherent economic vision. It is a convenient one for technocrats who profit from both automation that slashes payrolls and an endless supply of foreign workers that suppresses wages. Schmidt told the booing crowd that “America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to,” urging them to “choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant.”

The applause lines ignored the reality facing American graduates entering a marketplace already strained by prior waves of high-skilled visa workers.

Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies cut through the rhetoric with precision: businesses naturally want AI for productivity gains and immigration to keep labor costs down, but policymakers must force a choice. Congress cannot indulge both without betraying the American worker. Yet Schmidt and his cohort demand exactly that bargain.

The pattern is familiar. For decades, post-1990 policies have treated immigration as an economic steroid—importing workers, renters, and consumers to inflate GDP figures and asset prices while masking underlying weaknesses. Now AI accelerates the trend.

What mechanization did to Southern agriculture over decades, intelligent systems threaten to do to knowledge work in years. American software engineers who sacrificed to build careers find their roles diminished, not by superior competition but by policy choices that prioritize global labor arbitrage.

Schmidt’s stance echoes other financial titans. BlackRock’s Larry Fink once noted that nations resisting immigration turn to robotics and AI to offset demographic decline. The implication is telling: rather than protect citizens through sound policy, elites prefer importing replacement labor or replacing them with machines. Either path serves capital concentration over national cohesion.

Ken Griffin has lamented AI’s rapid encroachment on high-skilled finance roles, yet many in his circle still advocate for more visas that flood the very fields now automating.

California Republican gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton offers a sharper contrast—grow through genuine innovation and productivity, not demographic replacement. President Trump has similarly outlined an approach where robotics and American ingenuity fill gaps without surrendering sovereignty over the labor market.

These perspectives recognize a fundamental truth: a nation’s economy should serve its people, not treat citizens as interchangeable inputs in a global spreadsheet.

The human cost is mounting. Stories abound of Americans who clawed their way into middle-class tech careers only to watch the ground shift beneath them. One former junior engineer described years of intense self-study leading to stability for himself and his daughter, now threatened by AI disruption layered atop visa competition. Such accounts are not anomalies; they represent a fraying social contract. When tens of millions sense they have nothing left to lose, cultural stability erodes.

History offers warnings about societies that sacrifice their own for abstract notions of progress. When elites prioritize global flows over domestic fidelity, resentment builds—not from prejudice, but from lived experience of diminished opportunity. Constitutional principles and the American founding prioritized the general welfare of the citizenry, not the portfolio returns of multinational executives.

Schmidt’s generation of tech leaders built extraordinary tools, yet their policy prescriptions often reveal a disconnect from the human lives those tools disrupt. America does not need to choose between technological advancement and protecting its people. It needs leaders willing to pursue both without pitting them against each other. True ambition serves the nation that made it possible, not merely extracts from it.

As the Apostle Paul warned the church at Ephesus, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth” (Ephesians 4:28).

A just economy rewards honest work and enables provision, rather than engineering obsolescence for citizens while importing substitutes. Policymakers would do well to heed that ancient wisdom amid the silicon rush.