Reforms like the CP are key to international leadership.

The United States should embrace increased movement of people as an integral and beneficial fact of the world today, lead the international community in developing a coherent, legal, and humane management plan, and leverage U.S. history as a diverse society to benefit the U.S. economy and society writ large. As a result, the US could restore its reputation, become an appealing focal point for people around the world, and gain significant soft power. Migration is a major part of the world today, and it is an area where China is a non-player. The United States has a notable potential edge in this area over China. Washington should exploit it.

Is the United States inadvertently rejecting a strategic advantage in its competition with China?

The current immigration policy debate in the U.S. centers around how to limit immigration, with positions ranging from extreme restrictions and expulsions to calls to cap the current numbers of people coming into the country. Beyond the moral implications, such policies are shortsighted and 180 degrees wrong from economic prosperity and national security perspectives.

The United States’ restrictive immigration policies undermine U.S. competitive strategy toward China because it weakens the U.S. economy and damages Washington’s global influence. Instead, the United States should significantly increase immigration as a central element of a national security strategy that maximizes America’s strength as a growing, dynamic, open, and diverse society, admired and widely engaged with the world, relative to China as a demographically stagnant, closed, and largely homogenous society. In competing with China, a more expansive and open immigration policy is a potentially major area of comparative advantage for the U.S.

Washington should embrace increased well-structured legal immigration as a central element of policies to stimulate long-term economic growth and thereby build national power to compete with China. During the next several decades, America’s economic growth — the basis of national security — requires more workers. China, Japan, and much of Europe face long-term economic stagnation because of their declining populations. The birth rates of earlier waves of immigrants to the U.S. are declining, thus the main source of new workers is immigration. The importance of immigration to creating a growing, dynamic economy and society was sometimes recognized by past U.S. governments, e.g., those of the late 19th and 20th centuries. In contrast, during much of the last couple of decades, the U.S. has been harming economic growth by seeking to limit immigration (albeit sometimes unsuccessfully). In addition, efforts to restrict tech-worker visas (e.g., H-1B)1 to stimulate local hiring, end up limiting innovation and growth, including causing companies to locate outside the United States

Need for Tech Workers . . .

Developing advanced technologies, including new technologies, will be a key foundation of competition with China and U.S. national security in the coming decades. To strengthen U.S. technology leadership, the U.S. should expand, not contract its welcome to large numbers of scientists, researchers, technicians, and students from around the world and offer them a home to pursue their work. Indicative of the importance of foreign STEM graduates, between 2000 and 2015, roughly 178,000 non-U.S. personnel received STEM PhDs in the United States, or just over 40% of the total. Typically, about three-quarters remain in the United States for at least several years, with many becoming citizens, including, for example, half of those who graduated between 2000 and 2004. In fact, many of the cutting-edge Silicon Valley tech firms that play a key role in U.S. prosperity are led by immigrants. The U.S. should welcome them as equal, trusted partners in society, to further develop the United States’ open and collaborative technology ecosystem, a secret sauce of techno-economic leadership.