AI: The Immigrant Without a Visa?
Immigration policy is designed around humans, built over decades through visa requirements, asylum processes, and integration programs that govern who crosses which borders under what conditions. For AI, the equivalent institutions are only beginning to form, and the gap between the scale of the challenge and the capacity to address it is widening.
In 2023, the United States invested $67.2 billion in AI development, nearly nine times China’s $7.8 billion (Stanford AI Index 2024). Private AI investment in the European Union declined 14% from the previous year, while US investment grew 22%. OpenAI alone raised $40 billion in a single funding round in early 2025, with reports suggesting the company is now seeking up to $100 billion more. Europe produces substantial AI talent through its universities, yet a 2024 Interface report found that European countries are “losing significant AI talent, both national and international, to the United States.” This is a two-player game, and everyone else is choosing which infrastructure to depend on.
The smartphone in our pocket already declares a digital citizenship. We probably didn’t think of it as a citizenship decision when we bought it, but the code and apps running on that device determine which algorithms shape attention, where data flows, and whose values get encoded in the recommendations we see. No one stamped a passport, and no one asked which digital jurisdiction we wanted to belong to. We just bought a phone.
Consider what this means in practice. A teenager in Paris opens a social media app, and the recommendation engine deciding what she sees was trained in California, optimized for engagement metrics defined by American engineers, running on servers that could be anywhere. What counts as interesting, what gets amplified, what gets suppressed: the French parliament never voted on any of it. The values encoded in that algorithm arrived the same way the app did, through the app store, without debate.
In Berlin, a hospital adopts an AI diagnostic tool trained on American patients. The patterns the system learned (which symptoms cluster together, which presentations suggest which conditions) reflect American demographics, insurance incentives, and treatment protocols. German doctors using it may not know what assumptions are embedded in the model, and neither do their patients. The system simply appears as “AI-assisted diagnosis,” as though technology were neutral and the geography of its training irrelevant.
No referendum asked whether American assumptions should shape French teenagers’ worldviews, and parliamentary debate never considered whether foreign infrastructure should process European health data. These decisions happened through procurement, not politics, through app stores rather than elections.
Two ecosystems are forming with separate hardware, separate software, different training data shaped by different internets, and different standards for what AI systems should do and how they should behave. One sphere optimizes for engagement and corporate innovation while another optimizes for state control and surveillance infrastructure. Each is developing its own foundation models, its own cloud architecture, and its own definitions of what AI should be permitted to do.
Countries will choose sides through procurement decisions rather than treaties: which cloud stores citizens’ health records, which foundation models power public services, which chips run hospitals and schools. Once made, these choices create dependencies that compound over time as switching costs rise and alternatives narrow. The infrastructure you adopt becomes the infrastructure you’re stuck with.
Extend this forward a decade and the decision on your visa application might not be made by a consular officer but by an algorithm trained on data you’ve never seen, using criteria no human can fully explain. Approval could depend on patterns extracted from millions of previous applicants, patterns that might include which smartphone you used to submit the application, what time of day you filed it, or how quickly you scrolled through the terms of service.
Access to credit, employment, housing, and travel is increasingly mediated by systems trained elsewhere, encoding assumptions chosen by engineers in other countries, accountable to regulators who have no jurisdiction over the servers where decisions actually happen.
Yuval Noah Harari has described this as a new kind of curtain, one defined by infrastructure rather than ideology. The Iron Curtain descended in 1946, and managing that division required decades of diplomacy: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Helsinki Accords, hotlines installed between adversaries so that miscommunication wouldn’t escalate to catastrophe. Those institutions emerged because both sides recognized the danger of ungoverned conflict between incompatible systems.
I heard this concern recently from an Intelligence Officer from the United States Army: AI-driven political divisiveness eroding cohesion within and between allied countries. The infrastructure for managing that kind of slow-moving fragmentation, we both noted, doesn’t exist.
What is the equivalent infrastructure for algorithmic governance? There is no Treaty on AI Non-Proliferation, no hotline between Washington and Beijing for algorithmic incidents, no Geneva Convention for synthetic media, and no agreed definition of what constitutes an act of AI aggression. The division is forming while the diplomatic architecture to manage it is not.
The immigration debate consuming political energy concerns humans crossing borders, but the immigration already reshaping economies, cultures, and governance is algorithmic. It arrives through app stores and enterprise software contracts, through cloud computing agreements and semiconductor supply chains. Tristan Harris has argued that algorithmic systems need governance infrastructure equivalent to what we built for other cross-border challenges, and the EU’s AI Act is one response, though whether it proves sufficient remains an open question. The systems keep arriving while the debate about whose values they carry has yet to match the speed of their deployment.