Andrew Yang’s Idea of Meritocracy Is Impossible and Dangerous

There should be no ‘right’ way to be an immigrant in order to enter into the United States

Democratic presidential candidate, entrepreneur Andrew Yang greets guests at the Polk County Democrats’ Steak Fry on September 21, 2019 in Des Moines, Iowa. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

During the immigration section on the second night of the July Democratic presidential debates, candidate Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur and a graduate of Phillips Exeter, Brown University, and Columbia Law School, said, “My father immigrated here as a graduate student and generated over 60 U.S. patents for GE and IBM. I think that’s a pretty good deal for the United States. That’s the immigration story we need to be telling. We can’t always be focusing on some of the distress stories.”

Like Yang, I am also the child of immigrants. Unlike Yang and his family, my parents and I, and many other immigrants of the global south and their children, are not products of elite bastions of education. Thus, his comments greatly repulsed me. Yang constructs an elitist and capitalistic dichotomy of worthy and unworthy immigrants instead of a monolithic humanitarian argument that immigrants are human beings who deserve the right to a decent home, adequate medical care, and quality education.

Yang’s statements on July 31 argue for a meritocratic immigration system, but meritocracy cannot exist in a global order of U.S. destabilization and intervention in foreign countries. What chances do the people of the global south have to achieve the merits necessary to immigrate to Andrew Yang’s United States if the hooves of the Four Horsemen of the Ameripocalypse — (military) aid, regime change, civil war, and poverty — have trampled their countries?

Boiled down, Yang’s soliloquy about immigration stated that the type of immigrants the United States should admit are “high-skilled” workers: laborers characterized by their higher education and training. Yang’s main immigration plan further demonstrates his affinity. By favoring high-skilled workers, Yang is implicitly stating that 1) the purpose of immigration is to grease the wheels of capitalism and generate a profit, 2) a person’s potential contribution to the economy dictates the value of that person’s life, and 3) the global order of destabilization and intervention can go continuously unremedied.

Yang constructs an elitist and capitalistic dichotomy of worthy and unworthy immigrants instead of a monolithic humanitarian argument that immigrants are human beings who deserve the right to a decent home, adequate medical care, and quality education.

It is important to remember that who is considered to be a high- or low-skilled worker is dependent upon the education they received and, by extension, the political conditions of the country from which they emigrate. A nation embroiled in civil war and plagued by poverty probably won’t have a robust education system, rendering its workers low-skilled (or, perhaps, unskilled). It is a slippery slope from prioritizing high-skilled immigrants to implementing racist immigration policies that exclude people from “shithole countries” like Haiti and accept people from our in-group—perhaps from Norway? Yang and others in the Democratic Party ought to be prudent and not fall into this potentially xenophobic trap.