Lawmaker, advocacy leader underscore legal immigration as central to US AI dominance

Legal immigration and the creation of more manufacturing jobs will be necessary to ensure the U.S. continues to lead in artificial intelligence innovation, according to two policy leaders.

Speaking during Siemens' AI for Real conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said having jobs to help scale the energy and computing infrastructures that increasing AI usage demands will dictate the future of U.S. technological leadership. Rounds is co-chair of the Senate AI Caucus.

“We don't have enough young people entering fields that, traditionally, people would say are the tradescraft, whether you're talking electricians, plumbers, anybody that's working in a manufacturing facility, people that are building buildings,” Rounds said. “We know right now that just on the building side of things, just for construction alone, we're going to need about another 155,000 jobs per year for the next 10 years.”

In order to fill these positions, Rounds said legal immigration and supporting population growth are two solutions to ensure the U.S. has the workforce needed to respond to the AI industry’s demands. 

“Legal immigration is critical to the success of this country,” Rounds said. “Long term, we've got to be able to bring in the best and the brightest who want to see the American dream, we've got to have a legal immigration system that allows that to happen.”

He further said that the application of AI within various business operations does stand to impact the job market — specifying that AI could take away “lower-skilled jobs” — but that upskilling employees will mitigate job displacement.

“AI is going to require more people working in the United States, not less,” Rounds said. “I'm just telling you: I don't believe we're going to lose jobs. We may lose lower-skilled jobs, but the job of a business person is to take that person that was in that lower-skilled job and to help them become a more skilled person and to put them back to work again.”

Nextgov/FCW reached out to Rounds’s office to inquire about what lower-skilled jobs he believes may be lost, but did not hear back by the time of publication. 

Other speakers from the same event echoed the need for continued manufacturing to build out a robust AI infrastructure. Jay Timmons, the president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, said that his organization is happy with the Trump administration’s prioritization of the manufacturing component needed to create a robust U.S. AI industry.

Timmons and Rounds also agreed that both legal immigration to boost a domestic U.S. workforce — as well as the need for permitting reform to expedite U.S. data center construction — are critical.

“When it comes to workforce, when it comes to immigration, we've been pushing immigration reform,” Timmons said. “This administration, I think, probably uniquely understands the economic connection to legal immigration. We're going to be working with them to try to make sure that we have a plan moving forward.”