China’s immigration policy makes a whole lot more sense than the U.S.’s. From a direct submission by SLL reader Kenric Ward:
As millions of illegal aliens stream across the U.S. southern border and the Biden administration moves to import more foreign workers, China’s government has pursued a decidedly different immigration policy which has helped to expand that nation’s middle class.
More than 1 million legal migrants arrive in the U.S. annually, and an estimated 1.4 million illegal aliens (a group the size of San Diego) entered this country just last year. Currently, America is home to more than 48 million foreign-born residents, and counting.
Contrast that incoming tidal wave with China, which has barely 1 million immigrants, total. According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), only about 10,000 individuals were granted resident status in China between 2004 and 2016 (less than 900 per year). Naturalization figures are even lower.
Though China’s supply of rural workers is shrinking and growth in rural-urban migration has abated, Beijing has not resorted to U.S.-style mass immigration. Instead, the communist-capitalist nation selectively targets a limited cadre of professional, commercial and educational migrants.
China’s 2012 Exit-Entry Administration Law strengthened the government’s control over immigration, a move that benefited Chinese workers.
A 2021 analysis by McKinsey & Co.shows China’s average per-capita net worth at 8.2 times Gross Domestic Product (GDP) versus 4.3 in the United States. China accounted for 50 percent of the growth in personal net worth, followed by the U.S. (22 percent) and Japan (11 percent).
In 2000, roughly 3 percent of China’s population was classified as middle class. By 2018, more than half of the population — 707 million people — had entered the country’s middle-income bracket, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
China’s dramatically expanding middle class and McKinsey’s findings prompted a Yahoo News article to declare: “China is now the world’s richest country.”
Few American workers would trade places with their Chinese counterparts to labor under an authoritarian regime. Yet a “democracy” that won’t secure its borders fails its citizens and sacrifices national sovereignty.
Though Chinese workers have a long way to go in terms of individual and political freedoms, they are gaining materially while average U.S. wages have flat-lined over the past four decades, when adjusted for inflation. That period coincides with the historic surge of immigration into this country.
Not all economic advances – or stagnation — can be attributed to immigration policy, of course. But the law of supply and demand has not been revoked in the job market. It is no coincidence that the ranks of Chinese middle class workers swelled while immigration was strictly controlled.
The 1,050,000 immigrants currently in China represent 0.075 percent of the population, the lowest share of migrants in any country in the world.
Significantly, China’s legal immigrant total is far smaller than the number illegal migrants who came to America just last year. Beyond driving down U.S. wages through an underground economy, these aliens cost American taxpayers over $100 billion annually in public services. Those costs are compounded and multiplied by the annual influx of legally admitted foreign nationals eligible for a smorgasbord of local, state and national social-welfare programs.
It is a naïve conceit to assert that the United States is the only land of promise. Millions of Africans and Southeast Asians would gladly emigrate to China’s booming coastal cities. But they have not been welcome, as admissions are carefully metered to avoid the depressing effect mass immigration has on wages, and its disruptive impact on national unity and cultural cohesion.
“As [China’s] society and economy have become richer, better educated and internationally connected … talk of ‘useless’ foreigners or unnecessary competition on a job market already filled with Chinese graduates has increased,” observes Frank Pieke, former director at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.
By strategically tailoring immigration to national advantage, Beijing “does not aim to make society more ‘diverse’ or ‘inclusive’ per se,” Pieke says.
On the other hand, the Chinese government has no aversion to sending select students and workers abroad. In fact, the largest cohort of overseas emigrants to the U.S. comes from – you guessed it – China. That, too, is a strategic and profitable move, as those emigrés send billions of dollars in remittances back to their home country every year ($14.52 billion in 2018). Advantage, Beijing.
