Competing with China

I recently read the Now It can be Told by General Leslie Grove. It is the story of the Manhattan Project, the US/UK project to build the atomic bomb during WWII. It was written by the man who was in overall charge of the project. The book is full of interesting details about the project and the attempts to understand where Japan and Germany were on the development of their own atomic capability. In the book Groves dismisses Japan as a contender, primarily because they didn’t have the population to support such a massive effort. With a population of only one quarter of the size of the USA they wouldn’t be able produce enough physicists and engineers to be able to create an atomic bomb. Which bring us to Immigration.

Right now the USA has about one quarter of the population of China. If in the long run we want to compete with China we need to grow our population and the best way to do that is through immigration. If we were to start allowing about one percent growth per year of our population through immigration it would only be a few decades before we had a competitive sized population. I call this the one percent solution and have written extensively about it on the Beyond Borders website. Of course this was many years ago.

There are millions of people who would really like to come and enjoy the freedom and opportunity of being Americans. We would in the long run gain the value of those peoples contributions and the moral high ground of welcoming the stranger. Of course there will be losers and we need to mitigate that as much as possible. But in the long run if we open the door a little bit to new people we will benefit and the world will benefit.