Buffet’s shareholder letter praises immigrants

Billionaire offers optimistic take

It’s become an American tradition to parse billionaire Warren Buffett’s annual letters to his shareholders for nuggets of plain-spoken insight, wit and sometimes a dash of politics.

In this year’s letter, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman brought up a familiar subject under Donald Trump’s presidency: immigrants.

“Americans have combined human ingenuity, a market system, a tide of talented and ambitious immigrants, and the rule of law to deliver abundance beyond any dreams of our forefathers,” Buffett wrote.

The billionaire’s praise of immigrants contrasts actions by the new presidency. Trump’s travel ban and raids of undocumented immigrants have left some chief executives “deeply concerned,” while the technology industry has joined in opposition.

Buffett also glanced off a couple of other Trump talking points in his letter — offering a much more optimistic take than the president.

Where Trump has railed about foreigners subsuming American debt and assets — “they suck the blood right out of our country” he once said of China — Buffett was sanguine.

“Foreigners, of course, own or have claims on a modest portion of our wealth. Those holdings, however, are of little importance to our national balance sheet,” he wrote.

And those worried about the course of the next four years might glean some hidden hope in this passage:

“Yes, the build-up of wealth will be interrupted for short periods from time to time. It will not, however, be stopped.

“Babies born in America today are the luckiest crop in history,” Buffett wrote.