We Can All Do Better (17 page)

On occasion, conflict has accompanied large waves of immigration to America. It happened when the Irish and the Germans
came in the nineteenth century and the Italians and Eastern Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it happens now with Mexicans and Muslims. Since passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which abolished the national-origins quota system, the face of immigration has changed; there are fewer Europeans and more Central Americans, Asians, and Africans. We have absorbed these immigrants into our larger culture with a minimum of negative repercussions. When I heard a recent radio interview with Linda Sarsour, an Arab American woman preparing to run for the New York City Council from a Brooklyn district that is heavily Moroccan, Algerian, and Palestinian, I was moved by her obvious devotion to the sense of possibility that is the birthright of all Americans. Newcomers have always added value to America. Look at New York or Jersey City or San Jose or Houston or Miami or Chicago in the last thirty years; each has been revitalized by immigrant communities that have come to America to build lives they couldn't lead in their homelands. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur I know, a Pakistani Muslim married to a Hindu woman from India, once remarked to me, “Where else in the world but America could we be happy and accepted?”

Japan forbade non-Japanese to enter its island nation until the 1850s, and it still has very little immigration, even in the face of a declining birth rate. China has treated its minorities as groups to be controlled, not as individuals with valuable potential. Europe has historically focused on differences among its member states more than on commonalities. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Britain have little history of genuine assimilation. As these societies age and birth rates drop, their economic future is bleak without immigration. Yet when immigrants do come, they trigger a more negative cultural and emotional reaction from a larger segment of the population than does immigration in the United States. At
its extreme, the xenophobia produces riots in Britain and France and the murder of innocent children on an island in Norway by a right-wing fanatic who thinks immigration and assimilation are ruining Europe.

In contrast, our history shows that each wave of immigrants added definition to what it meant to be an American. America is not static but constantly changing. Having overcome the deep racism of its history and integrated successive waves of immigrants, the United States, more than any other country, should welcome the pluralism that is growing in the age of the Internet and whose successful management could inspire admiration around the world.

With regard to Mexico, our neighbor to the south, the answer is not building walls to separate us. Walls can be circumvented—witness the flourishing drug trade that still plagues us. For those who want to stop the border crossings, the answer is promoting economic growth in Mexico through trade and establishing a farsighted guest-worker program here. Who would leave their families, live in miserable conditions, and subject themselves to arrest if they weren't ambitious and didn't believe in a better future? Immigrants from Mexico and many other countries come to America for a job, often willing to work hard at things many Americans simply don't want to do. Doctors end up driving taxis, accountants clean houses, and when you call a plumber to fix your leaking pipe, an electrician to rewire your house, a mason to build a stone wall, someone to work in your restaurant kitchen or mow your lawn or care for your child or sit with your elderly parent, inevitably, in many places in America, you will get an immigrant. Until our culture makes blue-collar work once again noble, many Americans won't want to do it. Increasingly, the only people who will know how to deal with the nuts and bolts of our society will be people who learned their skills in another country.

The path to U.S. citizenship should be open to anyone, but it should be a definitive choice. Until the late 1960s, people who became
U.S. citizens weren't allowed to vote in their home country's elections. The naturalization oath still includes a renunciation of allegiance to any other country. Yet today it is possible to carry an American passport and the passport of another country. So you have a foot in two places. With that American passport, if things go to hell in the place you come from, you can always flee to America with no questions asked. America is your fallback. You can have dual allegiance. In the past, American immigrants wanted to become Americans. Their future was here. They had a profound reason to participate in the affairs of their country, volunteer for its army, teach their kids English, learn our history. Now for some U.S. passport holders America has become a place of convenience, not commitment.

Our future will depend more on economic competition than on military conflict, and China is our number-one challenge. The United States continues to regard China as if it were just like any other country. It isn't. Its population and its culture make it a formidable economic competitor—but not a military adversary. While armed conflict with its neighbors has played a role in Chinese history, China has not launched a war of aggression far beyond its periphery since the Manchu expeditions in the eighteenth century. It ended its overseas expansion and opted out of maritime imperialism. Instead, it exercised its power economically by granting access to the Middle Kingdom. Today, the Chinese have modernized this technique. Companies and leaders censor what they do and say about China out of fear of government retaliation against their interests there. The more deeply companies become entwined with the Chinese economy, the greater China's leverage.

China's defense budget is growing, true, but ours is still larger than the defense budgets of China, Russia, Germany, England, Brazil,
and India combined.
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Given how many times foreign powers have invaded China over the centuries, it is understandable that the Chinese want a defense capability that will allow them to defend their country against all comers, but they're smart enough not to waste their treasure in military adventures. Just look at Taiwan. China claims that it is a province of China, but it has taken the long view that in time the natural evolution of economic connections and cultural affinity will bring Taiwan back into the Chinese fold. Preparing for a military competition with China is old-think. Economics is the challenge of the twenty-first century. The Chinese have internalized this fact; we seem to have forgotten it. As Bill Overholt, senior research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School has said, “After World War II, we stimulated the economic growth of our allies in Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia and we won the Cold War through the economic revival and dynamism of Western Europe, Japan and friendly Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union lost through economic failure. Our military was vital to
protecting
the core nation building strategy, but the core strategy was economic and institution building.”
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Militarizing every disagreement in the world as an act of first resort not only will bankrupt us but also misses the nature of the threat we face and further erodes our example.

The Chinese are strategic thinkers above all else. They're able to decide on a long-term policy and follow it. For thirty years, the Chinese have said that their first priority was developing their own country, not seeking military conquest of their neighbors. They want to move people out of poverty. They want to raise the country's living standard. They want to amass wealth. In order to do that, given their 1.3 billion people and limited natural resources, they need to influence events outside China without resorting to military aggression.

Just a few examples of how China's strategic thinking translates into action: They intend to build three high-speed rail lines to the west. The first line will go southwest from China to Singapore. The
next will go through Central Asia to Turkey and then to London (a modern version of the ancient silk route), and the last will go across Russia to Moscow and on to Berlin. These projects will cost billions of dollars and take decades to complete. When finished, they will also give China access to the natural resources of Central Asia, Siberia, and Southeast Asia.
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Meanwhile, in the United States, we can't even finish the rail line from Dulles International airport to downtown Washington, DC.

Another example of China's long view is its aim to dominate its neighbors through the management of water resources. China needs electricity, and hydropower is one of the best renewable energy sources. The Chinese government intends to build several giant dam projects in addition to the one at Three Gorges. The strategic implications arise because they will build the dams on rivers that flow into India and Southeast Asia. By controlling the headwaters of the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, and Mekong, they will have leverage over countries whose economic welfare depends on those rivers. So, from within their own country and in a way that improves their own economy, they are establishing themselves as the regional hegemon.

Yet another example of farsightedness is what China is planning in the vicinity of the United States: They trade more than ever with Brazil and Venezuela, and they have suggested to Colombia that they help finance the construction of a rail line between the country's Pacific and Caribbean coasts. Such a route will be an alternate to the Panama Canal, which itself is being widened to accept larger container ships. We have known about this widening of the Panama Canal for a decade, but Norfolk, Virginia, is still the only Atlantic port in the United States large enough to accept the new container ships that will transit it. Meanwhile, China has acted. Li Ka-shing, the wealthiest man in Hong Kong, has built a giant port in the Bahamas that can accept the new ships. The port will offload cargo for transport to American ports that can accommodate only the
smaller container ships. The Chinese building of ports doesn't stop in North America. They have built a port in Gwadar, Pakistan, which has given them their first listening post on the Indian Ocean, close to the oil routes of the Persian Gulf. In addition, they are building or upgrading ports for governments in Burma, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

China is even active in the North Atlantic. Last summer, Huang Nubo, one of the richest Chinese real-estate tycoons, offered to buy three hundred square kilometers of Iceland. When he was asked why he needed such a vast tract of land, he said that he wanted to build a resort. Iceland, a non–EU sovereign country between Europe and America, will have a much larger role to play in a world where the warming of the planet will make hundreds of thousands of its acres usable. It will also be a transit point in Asian-Atlantic trade using a new polar shipping route. The Icelandic government said no to the investment.

The Chinese are locking up resources—oil, minerals, agriculture—all over the world, from Africa to South America to Australia. They even showed up in my small hometown on the Mississippi in search of iron ore and a port from which they could export the smelted pellets. You can gauge the magnitude of their effort by looking at Western Australia. There's such a shortage of labor for the region's iron, coal, and gold mines that companies pay heavy-machinery operators as much as $220,000 per year.
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Every morning at 4:45 a.m. at the Perth airport, hundreds of workers appear at a labor exchange and offer their services to the highest bidder. Planeloads of workers dressed in yellow mine uniforms disembark after two weeks in the mines and another group of similarly clad miners boards the planes for the next two-week shift.
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Chinese demand has created the boom.

A final example of China's strategic thinking relates to its long-term economic aspirations. China has long been a cheap labor country,
but in 2007, the 17th Congress of the Communist Party affirmed its intent to develop the nation's high-tech sector. China has often required foreign companies in some industries that locate in China to take a Chinese partner. It has ratcheted up the pressure on the high-tech companies to transfer technology to these joint ventures. Reverse engineering and other forms of appropriation then allow wholly owned Chinese companies to compete with those foreign companies on international markets. According to the German Engineering Federation, nearly two thirds of German machine-building companies suffer piracy of products and trademarks, resulting in €6.4 billion in lost revenues, with China being responsible for 80 percent of those losses.
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Everything China learns from their foreign partners moves them up the value chain to higher-paying jobs. With more than 6 million college graduates a year (up from 1 million a decade ago), China needs higher-paying jobs, so it is building advanced industries such as aviation, high-speed rail, sophisticated telecommunications, and oceanographic and space exploration. It allocated $19 billion in a multiyear grant for nanotechnology in its 2009 stimulus package (total U.S. spending on nanotechnology by government, venture capital, and the private sector is $6 billion). In 2011, China became the world's largest energy user and has tripled its patent filings in the last five years, growing a remarkable 56 percent in 2010 alone. It even offers gold-plated salaries to star foreign researchers to come and work in China. The aim is to steadily produce world-class economic players across industries and globally. Sany, a Chinese machinery group that produces everything from mobile cranes to excavators, has grown 50 percent per year ever since its founding seventeen years ago, with revenues in 2009 of $4.5 billion. After years of partnership with German companies in China, Sany in 2010 launched a production facility in Germany, competing in terms of price and quality with one of Germany's cherished industries on its own turf. In 2012, global
German machinery sales dropped 23 percent, to €178 billion, while the Chinese machinery industry sales rose 12 percent, to €300 billion. Germany is no longer number one in machinery.
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