The issue which is not addressed well in this article is: how much of the US' attractiveness to skilled immigrants was due to its economic dominance? The US economy was something like 40% of the world's GDP after World War 2 - why wouldn't a smart guy move to the US to take advantage of the economic opportunities in a large, rich, undestroyed by war, country?
The equivalent today is: China has been the fastest growing opportunity in the world for the past generation. They are, or will soon be, the largest economy in the world.
I also see a distinct oversight: the Nazi rocket scientists and Japanese medical experimenters.
Why the competition between US and China must be a zero-sum game? This will just narrow our mindset and force the response from both countries into a loss-loss situation. It’s a real waste of resources and an increase in inefficiency for the whole world. Americans should be more open-minded and spend time in China to understand the country and its people.
Sounds very much as if you're advocating the position that it's ethically justifiable for the US to unilaterally pardon psychopathic architects of genocide (e.g. WW2 Nazis) simply to gain intellectual and economic advantage from them.
Not quite sure how this position squares with the aim of "creating meaningful, substantive moral distinctions between ourselves and our rivals."
Quite frankly, an enormous percentage of the planet would be exceptionally grateful if the US would actually deliver on its existing promises of moral superiority, rather than spending its time cynically making new ones designed only to boost its "moral image" rather than take substantive actions that align with the promises.
"The bulk of the prosecutions of the past three years…are related to a lack of candor, such as the failure to disclose ties to Chinese funding or institutions…"
Al Capone was only ever prosecuted for tax evasion. Can we then conclude that his crimes were insignificant accounting mistakes? A lot of tech-transfer espionage is really hard to prosecute. They may not even be criminal offenses --- a breach of NDA with some tech company may only be a civil matter.
So, there are two ways to interpret these prosecutions:
1) The prosecuted are basically innocent and just happened to slip up and say the wrong thing to an investigator or made an honest mistake and forgot to put some organization name on a form.
2) The prosecuted are actually guilty of espionage, but that's very difficult to prove (or can only be proved by revealing sources), so prosecutors go after charges that are easier to prove --- just like they did with Al Capone.
The truth is probably somewhere between the two. The question you should be asking yourself is: do you think that the three-letter agencies (TLAs) are good at their jobs or not? If you think they're competent, then you should be on the 2 end of the spectrum. If you think they're incompetent, then you should be on the 1 end of the spectrum.
When people think of espionage, they usually think of real cloak and dagger stuff where there's a clear spy like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. Instead, a lot of espionage is just bycatch stuff where an intelligence agent asks some scientist/engineer for a bit of info when they come home to visit their parents. I know someone who gets contacted by their country's intelligence agency when they return home, and the TLAs when they come to the US. The person isn't a "spy" in the sense of Ames or Hanssen. They're just a person who travels and possibly knows interesting things.
If some Chinese scientist travels home for the holidays, gets contacted by Chinese intelligence agencies, and hands over some info, it's basically impossible for the TLAs to prosecute them directly, but it's not impossible for them to have good reason to believe that they did it. In fact, if they did prosecute for espionage, they might have to give up information on how they know about the espionage! Of course they don't! You should expect them to get charged with making a false statement. However, there's no way for an outside observer to differentiate this from TLAs simply being jerks and/or incompetent. What you see is mostly a reflection of your priors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
First, there are brain drains and brain drains. There is a big difference between importing scientists from China and health care workers from, say, Nigeria. The latter kind of import may well hurt the exporting country. Many countries have many fewer educated people than they need, and are hurt hard by emigration.
Second, I'm all for immigration. But it may be worth noting that there is no shortage of, say, American-born corporate lawyers. I worked at a pretty fancy corporate law shop with about 40 lawyers, including a physics major, two math majors, and one math minor. Plenty of hard STEM talent here: all American-born. Funny that.
You get what you pay for, and STEM doesn't pay all that much, considering the alternatives. Our need for immigrant STEM talent is linked to our STEM pay scale, relative to the alternatives for native-born Americans.
I agree with Noah that trying to engineer a "brain drain" won't bring about the precipitous collapse of Chinese science (they're just too big). I have argued (on this blog among other places, as it happens) for a "steal their talent" policy on the part of the US for a couple of related reasons:
1) You can't have too much talent.
2)The CCP doesn't likely view the specter of Chinese talent flowing to the USA with much equanimity. Indeed, it's a virtual certainty those xenophobic, anti-Western, paranoid tyrants view such a development with extreme negativity. And so they'll react. Which is what you want. IOW, you want to make it as hard as possible for the CPC to govern/dominate/direct Chinese society. In short, you want to make it challenging for them to maintain a modicum of popularity and support among China's well-educated elites. Blocking said elites from pursuing overseeing opportunities is a good way to bring about this challenging environment.
Global geopolitics are likely to remain stressed, dangerous and fraught as long as as planet's biggest economic power (or second biggest, depending on how you count it) remains a one party dictatorship. Regime change really is the only long term solution (let's be blunt). But let's not kid ourselves: this three thousand year old civilization isn't going to allow us to tell it how to govern itself. >>Change has to come from within<<. But we can (maybe) hope to make this change arrive faster and happen more easily by doing what we can to make the status quo more difficult to maintain. Reducing the popularity of the regime is one of the few credible tools in our arsenal; hence the desirability of forcing Beijing to do unpopular things like, erm, blocking ambitious, well-educated Chinese people from seeking better lives abroad.
The US strategy can be rephrased as simply "an outlet for speech is the best for smart people". Counter example for why that will be annoying: Hong Kong and Taiwan.
America isn't even bringing in the immigrants who have been approved. We currently have almost half a million immigrants whose documentation is complete and are just waiting for an interview to get in. It's weird no one is talking about that considering the current worker shortage. Over 8 million people are waiting to apply. We don't necessarily need to go out and find new people. Just schedule Zoom calls with all the immigrants who need interviews and actually start processing new applicants.
It is hard to justify immigration policy that concentrates only on China. The same goal is achieved through allowing much more skilled immigration (say, 1/2-1 million per year) from all the autocratic regimes: China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Belarus, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. The US will get even more talented people, but immigrants will be also more diverse making the policy more palatable to average American voters. Its national defense angle can be convincing for republicans, and its "good guy"/innovation angle should be convincing for democrats. Note: as a Russian I have a conflict of interest here.
You describe brain drain as mostly a myth, but in the past you've mentioned brain drain to the US as having a negative effect on Canada. Have you changed your mind on that?
> Of course, that effort would have to be paired with vigorous efforts to present the U.S. as a place where Chinese people can feel safe and free from racial discrimination. That will require cracking down further on anti-Asian hate crime, as well as stepping up rhetorical efforts to make Asian immigrants feel like America cares about them and can be their family’s permanent home.
This sounds right, but US Media loves shitposting that Chinese people live a miserable life. If this continues to happen, I don't believe Chinese immigrants feel like America cares about them.
Hungarian Leo Szilard invented the chain reaction & wrote the letter sent by Einstein to POTUS that led to the Manhattan project.
The issue which is not addressed well in this article is: how much of the US' attractiveness to skilled immigrants was due to its economic dominance? The US economy was something like 40% of the world's GDP after World War 2 - why wouldn't a smart guy move to the US to take advantage of the economic opportunities in a large, rich, undestroyed by war, country?
The equivalent today is: China has been the fastest growing opportunity in the world for the past generation. They are, or will soon be, the largest economy in the world.
I also see a distinct oversight: the Nazi rocket scientists and Japanese medical experimenters.
Why the competition between US and China must be a zero-sum game? This will just narrow our mindset and force the response from both countries into a loss-loss situation. It’s a real waste of resources and an increase in inefficiency for the whole world. Americans should be more open-minded and spend time in China to understand the country and its people.
Sounds very much as if you're advocating the position that it's ethically justifiable for the US to unilaterally pardon psychopathic architects of genocide (e.g. WW2 Nazis) simply to gain intellectual and economic advantage from them.
Not quite sure how this position squares with the aim of "creating meaningful, substantive moral distinctions between ourselves and our rivals."
Quite frankly, an enormous percentage of the planet would be exceptionally grateful if the US would actually deliver on its existing promises of moral superiority, rather than spending its time cynically making new ones designed only to boost its "moral image" rather than take substantive actions that align with the promises.
"The bulk of the prosecutions of the past three years…are related to a lack of candor, such as the failure to disclose ties to Chinese funding or institutions…"
Al Capone was only ever prosecuted for tax evasion. Can we then conclude that his crimes were insignificant accounting mistakes? A lot of tech-transfer espionage is really hard to prosecute. They may not even be criminal offenses --- a breach of NDA with some tech company may only be a civil matter.
So, there are two ways to interpret these prosecutions:
1) The prosecuted are basically innocent and just happened to slip up and say the wrong thing to an investigator or made an honest mistake and forgot to put some organization name on a form.
2) The prosecuted are actually guilty of espionage, but that's very difficult to prove (or can only be proved by revealing sources), so prosecutors go after charges that are easier to prove --- just like they did with Al Capone.
The truth is probably somewhere between the two. The question you should be asking yourself is: do you think that the three-letter agencies (TLAs) are good at their jobs or not? If you think they're competent, then you should be on the 2 end of the spectrum. If you think they're incompetent, then you should be on the 1 end of the spectrum.
When people think of espionage, they usually think of real cloak and dagger stuff where there's a clear spy like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. Instead, a lot of espionage is just bycatch stuff where an intelligence agent asks some scientist/engineer for a bit of info when they come home to visit their parents. I know someone who gets contacted by their country's intelligence agency when they return home, and the TLAs when they come to the US. The person isn't a "spy" in the sense of Ames or Hanssen. They're just a person who travels and possibly knows interesting things.
If some Chinese scientist travels home for the holidays, gets contacted by Chinese intelligence agencies, and hands over some info, it's basically impossible for the TLAs to prosecute them directly, but it's not impossible for them to have good reason to believe that they did it. In fact, if they did prosecute for espionage, they might have to give up information on how they know about the espionage! Of course they don't! You should expect them to get charged with making a false statement. However, there's no way for an outside observer to differentiate this from TLAs simply being jerks and/or incompetent. What you see is mostly a reflection of your priors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Two points:
First, there are brain drains and brain drains. There is a big difference between importing scientists from China and health care workers from, say, Nigeria. The latter kind of import may well hurt the exporting country. Many countries have many fewer educated people than they need, and are hurt hard by emigration.
Second, I'm all for immigration. But it may be worth noting that there is no shortage of, say, American-born corporate lawyers. I worked at a pretty fancy corporate law shop with about 40 lawyers, including a physics major, two math majors, and one math minor. Plenty of hard STEM talent here: all American-born. Funny that.
You get what you pay for, and STEM doesn't pay all that much, considering the alternatives. Our need for immigrant STEM talent is linked to our STEM pay scale, relative to the alternatives for native-born Americans.
I agree with Noah that trying to engineer a "brain drain" won't bring about the precipitous collapse of Chinese science (they're just too big). I have argued (on this blog among other places, as it happens) for a "steal their talent" policy on the part of the US for a couple of related reasons:
1) You can't have too much talent.
2)The CCP doesn't likely view the specter of Chinese talent flowing to the USA with much equanimity. Indeed, it's a virtual certainty those xenophobic, anti-Western, paranoid tyrants view such a development with extreme negativity. And so they'll react. Which is what you want. IOW, you want to make it as hard as possible for the CPC to govern/dominate/direct Chinese society. In short, you want to make it challenging for them to maintain a modicum of popularity and support among China's well-educated elites. Blocking said elites from pursuing overseeing opportunities is a good way to bring about this challenging environment.
Global geopolitics are likely to remain stressed, dangerous and fraught as long as as planet's biggest economic power (or second biggest, depending on how you count it) remains a one party dictatorship. Regime change really is the only long term solution (let's be blunt). But let's not kid ourselves: this three thousand year old civilization isn't going to allow us to tell it how to govern itself. >>Change has to come from within<<. But we can (maybe) hope to make this change arrive faster and happen more easily by doing what we can to make the status quo more difficult to maintain. Reducing the popularity of the regime is one of the few credible tools in our arsenal; hence the desirability of forcing Beijing to do unpopular things like, erm, blocking ambitious, well-educated Chinese people from seeking better lives abroad.
The US strategy can be rephrased as simply "an outlet for speech is the best for smart people". Counter example for why that will be annoying: Hong Kong and Taiwan.
America isn't even bringing in the immigrants who have been approved. We currently have almost half a million immigrants whose documentation is complete and are just waiting for an interview to get in. It's weird no one is talking about that considering the current worker shortage. Over 8 million people are waiting to apply. We don't necessarily need to go out and find new people. Just schedule Zoom calls with all the immigrants who need interviews and actually start processing new applicants.
It is hard to justify immigration policy that concentrates only on China. The same goal is achieved through allowing much more skilled immigration (say, 1/2-1 million per year) from all the autocratic regimes: China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Belarus, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. The US will get even more talented people, but immigrants will be also more diverse making the policy more palatable to average American voters. Its national defense angle can be convincing for republicans, and its "good guy"/innovation angle should be convincing for democrats. Note: as a Russian I have a conflict of interest here.
You describe brain drain as mostly a myth, but in the past you've mentioned brain drain to the US as having a negative effect on Canada. Have you changed your mind on that?
> Of course, that effort would have to be paired with vigorous efforts to present the U.S. as a place where Chinese people can feel safe and free from racial discrimination. That will require cracking down further on anti-Asian hate crime, as well as stepping up rhetorical efforts to make Asian immigrants feel like America cares about them and can be their family’s permanent home.
This sounds right, but US Media loves shitposting that Chinese people live a miserable life. If this continues to happen, I don't believe Chinese immigrants feel like America cares about them.