The Anti-China, Pro-Immigration Coalition
More and more members of Congress are realizing that America’s immigrant economy is a competitive advantage.
Lots of people want to study.
Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images South AmericaThe United States, despite its various well-known flaws, is a place where a lot of people around the world would like to live. It’s also a country that is in a pitched competition for global economic primacy with China. There are signs that Washington is now adding these two facts together to make good policy.
America’s cultural and historical legacy of immigration is enormous. An extremely large share of its most prominent and successful figures —Steve Jobs, Kamala Harris, Sergey Brin, Sidney Poitier — have been immigrants or the children of immigrants. The tradition of immigration is so strong that even the anti-immigration populist who was elected president came with a Slovenian-born first lady.