Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock and arguably one of the most powerful men on the planet, is now openly saying that the countries with xenophobic immigration policies are going to have a higher standard of living, faster productivity growth, and will be better able to accomdate the social impact of artificial intelligence advances over the coming years.

“You know, we always used to think shrinking population is a cause for negative growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in, shrinking unemployment, excuse me, shrinking demographics. These countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology. And if the promise, I didn’t say it’s going to happen, but as a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living of countries and the standard of living of individuals even with shrinking populations,” said Fink.

“And so the paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing. And the social problems that one will have in substituting humans for machines is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations,” he said.