it's bad for the US, because China has 10x population. the US can't make up in quality, what it lacks in quantity without immigration and attracting foreigners.
I don’t think you realise how many people in China still live in poverty, with not much prospects of improvement. I don’t see how having 100 million poor small scale farmers is a benefit in this equation.
You still can’t become a Chinese citizen. You can come to USA or Europe and build a life for yourself. While some people go to China to make some money for a few years you can’t really build a life. So I think US and Europe will still attract talent long term, and I don’t think you can discount that. China used to have the benefit of low cost labor, but that’s going away. What do they have to offer when that’s gone?
Chinas population isn’t 10x. It’s 4x. If you believe the numbers (the idea that local governments over report is not a fringe theory).
But it’s really only the wealthy coastal regions that matters in this comparison, and in that regard the population sizes are much closer. Yeah they can exploit cheap labor from the poor interior. But the US is doing something similar in some ways with central/southern America. The Hukou system means that China does act like a bunch of separate states in many regards, rather than one truly unified country.
> Foreign nationals may naturalize if they are permanent residents in any part of China
More specifically: I recall living in Hongkong and learning about non-ethnic Chinese people (usually South Asians) who became Chinese citizens to acquire a Hongkong passport. The process required them to denounce all existing citizenships. In the eyes of HK and mainland gov'ts, those people are Chinese citizens with HK PR and carry HK passport. The candidates needed to demonstrate sufficient language skills in either Cantonese or Mandarin. (I'm unsure if other regional languages were allowed.)
> You can come to USA or Europe and build a life for yourself.
There is a tiny minority of foreigners who do this in mainland China, as well as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Usually, they come to teach English, then marry a local and "build a life". Some also come as skilled migrants.
> Yeah they can exploit cheap labor from the poor interior. But the US is doing something similar in some ways with central/southern America.
I don't follow the part about the US exploiting LATAM labour. Can you explain more?
Yeah, and lots more immigration too. I don't know if those are the ones with college degree, but you can see who's writing all the academic papers. Look up stats like the 3rd most popular language by state and you'll be surprised. There has been a huge effort to import doctors from all over for example, due to the shortage in the US. Even in our tech industry, you don't need to look far to see all the H-1B's. I can't think of a single industry requiring skilled and educated workers that isn't relying on immigration significantly. Even our schools are relying heavily on Chinese and other foreign students for revenue lol.
My point was, the non-immigrant birth-rate is very low, so arguably the US should have arrived at the same demographic crisis as japan, china and south korea. Not only that, immigrants attend college at a much higher rate than native-born too.
Your argument was that the U.S. needs immigration to compete with China’s population advantage. But China doesn’t have a population advantage in college educated workers. China has to scale its educated workforce by sending more of its population to college. Which is certainly doable, but they are currently where the U.S. was 60 years ago.
Also, the U.S. has a fertility edge over China, which skilled immigrants do not contribute to. The birth rate of the groups comprising most skilled immigrants (Asians) is very low, much lower than for other Americans.
Skilled immigrants may not contribute to birth rate much, but immigrants as a whole contribute to the workforce across the spectrum. More working age people means less demand for unskilled labor, more demand for skilled labor and more competition for higher achievements to qualify for skilled work.
There are millions of phd's and super-talented engineers, but it is a small percentage of those that actually innovate and invent new things. And for them to do that, you need a corporate/commercial sector funding it. Even someone flipping burgers at mcdonalds is a consumer contributing to economic activity, which in turn contributes to funding competitive R&D and risk taking.
Simply having lots of people and free schools won't do much on its own. You need R&D funded, you need companies and the government itself to invest in risky scientific endeavors. Highly skilled jobs need to pay well. For example, there is a metric crapton of talent in Europe that flocks to the US for the pay alone, even though most of them hate it here. Even Candian pay across the border is dismal. That's why Europe doesn't have Nvidias, Intels, Googles,etc..
This very site alone belongs to US venture capitalists which are a product of capital available, a pipeline of educated labor domestically as well as immigrants. The products and services companies sell is mostly funded by consumers buying things, they can buy those things because they have jobs that pay well. The guy who flips burgers at mcdonalds buys a nintendo switch, the help desk worker nvidia gpus,etc... if your population is too old, those things don't happen, old people conserve money and their economic activity doesn't go as far.
Have you heard of the vitality curve? It's how in virtually everything involving human contribution, 10-20% carry the "thing" 10-20% are detrimental to it and everyone in between is needed to keep it from crumbling. I believe that's why performance reviews are always in quintiles. Either way, I don't know if the top 10% that give the US an advantage are immigrants, but some of them for sure. and a lot of the papers I'm seeing from the US in recent years have not been from US sounding names. But the middle 60% or so, it doesn't matter where they're from, you need enough people that are skilled and competent to keep the ship afloat.
If all the variables are the same, China has more people so it wins by default. The US however can attract talent from all over the world for the top 10% talent and have them compete. I don't know the stats but let's say 95% of educated people are native born. That still doesn't mean the competition for top jobs is adequate. To compete with China, the US's top 10% talent must have more quality to make up for the lack of quantity. Quality isn't measured by numbers and it isn't a product of random lack you can improve by increasing quantity. it's a product of competition and the incentives and rewards at the end, which includes compensation but more than that - the quality of life money affords.
In other words, whether immigrants are smarter or not, they can either contribute to the economy by being good and reliable consumers and laborers that create more economic activity and drive the demand and opportunities for skilled work, or, they can drive up the compeition for skilled work, driving up quality.
What you have in the US, is a lot of educated people are into things like health care these days, because that's where the demand is. Even immigrants. But in east asia, it's much worse, they do needs lots more health care workers and care givers for the elderly, which even there, they're using more and more immigrants.
The bulk importing of immigrants only serves to stabilize the economy. The importing of educated immigrants and workers (Most of YC would collapse without H-1B lol) drives competition and increases quality (innovation,inventiveness,etc..).
You can have more americans, even have more americans attend more college. But you can't kick out americans that refuse to pursue education or are content with mediocrity. You can filter out immigrants by telling them they don't have enough education or money (we've been doing this for a long time in the US), but you can't do that with natural born americans.
If you work in tech, this should be of no surprise to you.
If you go by official figures, China has 4.2 the population of the US, but some experts believe that China's official figure is drastically exaggerated.
