“Generals are always preparing to fight the last war,” French prime minister Georges Clemenceau is supposed to have said.
The remark became a classic in the context of the surprise advances achieved by the Nazis in 1939. But there’s a good reason why military strategists usually did what had usually worked. As long as military technology remained fairly static, as it did for hundreds of years, the playbook didn’t need to change. Only when technology began to shift from gunpowder and sail to missiles and flight did those old strategies prove disastrous
Immigration and Technology
I’ve written here before about how technological changes have disrupted immigration in the past, such as the correlation between more efficient steamship technology and increased trans-Atlantic immigration in the 1880s.
But things like more efficient steam engines were incremental changes in technology. In just a few years, technological change will hit warp speed.
This week, I’ve been exploring what leading technologists predict about the near future of AI and how it will change human life. Before opening that door, I had only a basic understanding of the changes and legal issues presented by the current version of AI. At least in the law and at least with the baby AI we have now, that really isn’t very much.
But leading technologists think everything – and I mean everything – is about to change. At SXSW this year, Ray Kurzweil said that anyone who survives the next five years might never – that’s right, never – need to die (at least of natural causes). And Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered the Deep Learning phenomenon behind this coming quantum leap, now thinks it’s possible that AI might even replace humanity.
This Is Immigration on AI
What does this mean for immigration policy?
One thing it surely means is that the problems we have today – the border surge, the asylum backlog – will change. A lot. Soon.
Even the most optimistic technologists, like Kurzweil, promise that the AI revolution will do two things: It will radically restructure work, and it will bring about unprecedented global wealth. In an optimistic 2018 TED Talk (albeit an ancient one, by AI standards), technologist and investor Kai-Fu Lee offered a roadmap for the jobs AI would replace, those it would complement, and those where it would amplify uniquely human contributions.
Commenters like Lee emphasize that the job disruptions of the AI era will have many benefits: AI will mostly replace the most routine and unrewarding jobs or tasks, and it will make paid work less necessary.
But it’s gonna be one helluva big adjustment. And in the process, people are going to move.
They probably won’t move in the same pathways and for the same reasons as they do now, or have for the past few centuries. Many will move because of opportunity, and that opportunity may very well not be in the United States or western Europe, where unskilled labor will become obsolete sooner. Many will move because of misery, and that misery may look different, and affect different groups of people, than anything we’re conditioned to expect.
Fighting the Last War
How does immigration law reform look in this light?
The immigration bill killed by the Senate this week would have focused primarily on the southern border and the asylum system. It would have:
given the president authority to implement summary removal procedures if the number of arrivals exceeded certain thresholds
raised the standard for migrants to pass an initial screening of eligibility to claim asylum
increased detention space by 47 percent compared to the past three years, though also requiring ICE to use alternatives to detention
On the immigrant visa side, the bill would have been the first expansion since 1990, but not by much – increasing employment-based visas by 13 percent and family-based visas by 7 percent. It would also have made that process a little easier in other ways, like ensuring that spouses and children could work and that kids would not “age out” if they turned 21 while their parents awaited a green card. These are valuable but certainly incremental reforms.
In the current political climate, I’d estimate that any meaningful immigration reform will take at least a decade to get done.
In the AI world, that’s an eternity. By then, migration trends and immigration challenges will have already have changed, and the pace of change will only accelerate.
It’s time to stop preparing to fight the last war in immigration policy.
Building Immigration Policy for the Coming Wave
How do we do that, when even those like Hinton who invented the monster can’t predict how it will behave, let alone how human life will change because of it?
One thing we can do is get serious about the obviously coming shift in labor demand from routine to tech jobs. As the U.S. economy gets automated, people seeking unskilled jobs won’t come here. They’ll probably go to middle-income countries.
But the demand for tech workers in the U.S. can be expected to vastly outpace the visa limit of 140,000 employment-based visas plus recapture from unused family-based visas.
More quietly than the “border bill,” Biden’s executive order on AI has begun to look ahead. The order instructs federal agencies to evaluate existing authority to facilitate and regulate AI, including encouraging and enabling tech worker immigration and protecting workers from job market disruptions. That’s a good place to start.
The Last Frontier: Imagination, Empathy, and Judgment
I’ll be following DHS and DOL progress on the executive order on How We Got Here over the coming year. But I’ll also go one step further: imagining our immigration future.
For that task, I can’t use my favorite tools, archival research and narrative history, because the future ain’t here yet. But I agree with Lee that, now more than ever, humanity needs to double down on the things that make us human: creativity, compassion, and judgment.
Before AlphaGo beat go master Lee Se-doi using a move that no human had ever imagined, people said AI couldn’t be creative. Maybe human creativity remains unique outside pattern recognition with precise goals (“find moves that will win at go”), but it’s really a philosophical question at this point.
I would argue, though, that human creativity is special because it’s combined with two other (we think) uniquely human capacities: compassion and judgment. As Kai-Fu Lee put it in his TED Talk, “When AlphaGo defeated the world champion Ke Jie, while Ke Jie was crying and loving the game of go, AlphaGo felt no happiness from winning and certainly no desire to hug a loved one.”
The more I learn about the future of AI, the more I believe in the goals of How We Got Here: Exploring our migrant past to empathize more deeply with both migrants and receiving cultures and, with that compassionate perspective, to make better judgments about what kind of world we want to live in. No intelligence, no matter how powerful, can tell us those things. Maybe Wilbur J. Carr can.
If we’re going to begin crafting tomorrow’s immigration policy before it’s too late, however, we need to bring those same human attributes to bear on the coming AI world. To that end, I’ll also begin experimenting here with another genre: fiction (or what we might call “a narrative history of the future”). Those stories will be grounded in the best predictions about where AI will take us and informed by the starting point of the present national and international law of migration. I hope that those stories, side by side with stories of our migrant past, might spark a conversation that moves us all the way from “how we got here” to “where we’re going” on immigration policy.
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