The US can’t begin to win an economic and technological competition against China without elite immigration. This is a strong statement, but I can prove it to you with a simple calculation. Consider the fact that China has four times the population of the US. Its 18-year-olds now attend college at roughly the same rate as Americans (this has only recently become true, as China has become richer and more developed). Chinese college students are roughly twice as likely to study science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and they graduate high school with much stronger math capabilities. This means that each year China is producing about eight times (almost an order of magnitude) more new engineers and technologists than the US. In fact, the proper comparison is between China and Rest of World (RoW). China produces as much top talent in technology fields as the RoW in aggregate. China does have demographic challenges due to low fertility, but the children who will enter the workforce over the next twenty years are already born, and detailed analysis shows a huge deepening of their human capital pool — a huge increase in the quality of Chinese skills and knowledge — over that period. When you combine this with world-leading infrastructure and supply chains, it means that China can innovate simultaneously in many areas: AI, semiconductors, solar energy, batteries, EVs, aerospace, satellite and space technology, biotech, nuclear energy, ship building, advanced materials, drones… the list goes on and on. Ask an expert in any of these areas and they are likely to tell you either that China is close to parity with the West or has already surpassed it. Take AI, the hottest and fastest-developing area in technology, and a focus of geopolitical and national security concerns. The figure here shows the flow of top research talents in AI, based on data obtained from the leading annual conference NeurIPS. ...