America Urgently Needs More Immigrants

If the United States wants to go on as a world power, it must strengthen its brain power against China. But this will only work if it can entice highly qualified immigrants to come to the country.

Between 2001 and 2015, the proportion of Americans belonging to the upper class fell from 3 to 1 percent, according to a Gallup Poll from April 2015. Those classifying themselves as upper and lower middle class shrank from 63 percent to 51 percent. In comparison, the proportion of Americans who consider themselves as working or lower class — those supported by welfare — jumped from 33 percent to 48 percent.

At the same time as this radical change, no other industrialized nation — East Asian, Scandinavian or other English-speaking country — has fallen further behind in learning competencies than the USA. Nowhere else does a teacher perceive student ability to be strongly connected to parental prosperity, measured in U.S. dollars.

Around 13 percent of Americans are regarded as socially disadvantaged in terms of wealth and income — that is to say, poor. Here, “social disadvantage” tends to be applied as a short form explanation for worse math grades, so as to avoid controversies about other reasons for failure. In many countries, there is a clear parallel between the parents’ financial resources and their child’s school achievement. An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study from July 2014 shows that on account of disastrous grades, math teachers at U.S. middle schools believe that it isn’t the expected 13 percent but rather a shocking 64.5 percent of their students who are socially disadvantaged.

Plight of the Middle Class

The decline of the middle class, with 8 percent less purchasing power than in 2007, runs parallel with the income increase — by a factor of 2.5 — among the Chinese working class. As before with Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, China enters as one more nation in the international labor and talent market, in which the “socially disadvantaged” possess a higher learning competency than the recruits of the American middle class. This was emphasized in the OECD study from May 2015, which predicted that by 2030, the global pool of engineers and scientists will be 37 percent Chinese but only 4.2 percent American.

By 2030, 25.7 percent of America’s population will consist of people of Chinese descent — 360 million out of 1.4 billion. In addition, its pool of scientists will be composed of nearly 11.4 percent Chinese. In its desire to defend its status as a world power, America must not only annually increase its number of “skilled immigrants” in order to remain number one globally, but it must also increase the amount of newfound talent by a factor of 2.

Almost all of the current highly skilled talent searching for a new homeland in America must pressure it to allow them to stay. But they could become increasingly hesitant to do so. According to the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, 51 percent of all American children performed deficiently, insufficiently, or still worse in math. In Germany, only migrant children, who now make up just a third of their generation, attained such a low level.

Of course, underachievers must then be paid humanely, if they are no longer sought after in the labor market. Once the most skilled laborers no longer need to migrate, especially due to low birth rates, such as in East Asia, they will steer clear of America, and the democratic giant will sink to its knees.