America’s answer to declining dominance in world trade is clear: Skilled, legal immigrants

The last few years have begun demonstrating to Americans how world trade can disrupt their everyday lives. It’s a disruption we can no longer afford to ignore.

The pandemic stretched supply chains to the limit, and now the economic sanctions against Russia are causing issues with moving goods freely across borders.

Despite these issues, it seems that most Americans don’t understand where the U.S. fits in the world economy, how American dominance in global markets is declining and how our anti-immigrant attitudes hinder our ability to compete.

Highly educated and skilled legal immigrants could help America become more competitive if Americans changed their attitudes about immigration.

In 1960, the U.S. economy accounted for 40% of the worldwide gross domestic product, while China’s global share was 4%. Fast-forward nearly 60 years to 2019, and the U.S. is down to 24%, while China has risen to 16%. This pattern does not appear to be changing anytime soon.

Currently, the world population is around 8 billion, with approximately 4% of people living in the U.S. and 4.6 billion, or 58% of the global population, living in Asia. It’s true that 39% of the world’s millionaires live in the U.S., while only 17% live in Asia. The disparity, however, is shrinking as Asia’s millionaire population continues to rapidly surge.

If education is the key to financial success, things are not looking good for Americans. China, for example, is graduating three times more doctoral students in science, technology, engineering and math fields.

Many Americans consider U.S. companies to be globally dominant, yet in reality these companies have a very small international market share. The U.S. market is not as desirable as many think, and we see huge companies choosing to skip investments in American markets altogether.

The American exceptionalism argument has been discussed on the political right for years. This ideology may be something to strive for, but our standing as a nation has declined in recent years. Becoming involved in military conflicts around the globe has come at an enormous cost to our worldwide reputation.

This is why immigration can help lift our nation of immigrants.

One of the most effective ways we can improve our ability to compete in the world economy, add to our research and development prowess, and reverse our shrinking tax base is to vastly increase the number of legal immigrants we allow into the U.S. with science, technology, engineering and math backgrounds.

Many would love to come to our country and help us make it better as they strive to better themselves at the same time. We should be recruiting those with science backgrounds, and we should provide incentives for them to achieve an easy transition into our economy.

Instead of recruiting businesses to move between states, we should be looking for high-tech workers to move across our borders.

It’s time we stop looking at immigrants as a threat to the American way of life. We need to embrace these immigrant stories as part of our own and an integral part of our future. Our success as a society and economy depends on it.