The US needs vastly more immigration from China: given that China is going to be most powerful other country or region in the world besides the US, probably more powerful than the US by quite a bit in the not so distant future, we should try to increase the familial and social networks between the US and China. That would make an outcome along the lines of the evolution of the UK-US relationship more likely...though familial ties between Germany and the US, or Germany and the UK, were also strong in the last 200 years. Indeed, I find it hard to think of what a rivalry with a country looks like that does not have large population flows to the US -- even the Soviet Union had a history of large population flows to the US before 1920.
My sense is the Chinese elites are still very willing to come to the US and Europe and we should take advantage of this opportunity to forge deep ties with Chinese society. Not that I think we'll take it up to the extent we should.
What fraction of the Russian population in 1920 or now has close relatives in the West? What's that fraction for China now?
Currently there are 1.9 million Chinese born people in the US and 3.5 million of at least partial Chinese decent. Only 630,00 German born people in the US (does that county me? I think so). 5 million European born people in the US. So China isn't doing so badly here, but there are a lot more Chinese than Europeans: so the faction of Europeans that have come to the US recently is probably in the realm of 5x as large as the fraction of Chinese. Not as big a difference as I'd expected off the cuff, but still something we should try to move towards equalizing, especially given the much larger historical depth of European immigration to the US.
Raising Chinese immigration to the US is a national security issue for the US.
Comments