Make Immigration Great Again

If we can do this in cricket, we can do it in anything.

I have a new article up at Discourse presenting the “The US Cricket Team’s Guide to Winning at Everything.” This is my promised commentary on the big lesson of the US cricket team’s upset win over Pakistan.

America just posted a stunning win from a team we didn’t even know we had, in a sport most of us don’t understand and could not possibly explain. If we can figure out the secret behind this, we can figure out how to become a leading world power in anything.

And the secret is very simple: immigration.

The big thing you’ll notice about the US cricket team is that it is dominated by Indian immigrants (plus an Australian, a South African, and the US-born children of Caribbean immigrants).

The joke that immediately made the rounds after the surprise US win in Dallas is that Pakistan didn’t lose to “India-B” (one of the Indian national cricket teams), they lost to “India H-1B.” India vs. Pakistan is the most intense rivalry in cricket, fueled by the geopolitical rivalry between the two countries. It’s a bit like the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, but with nuclear weapons. The US cricket team is dominated by Indian immigrants who are here on H-1B visas awarded to skilled workers, particularly in the tech industry.

The biggest star of the game—the team’s “bowler,” the equivalent of a pitcher in baseball—is Saurabh Netravalkar, who was raised in Mumbai and came to the U.S. for graduate school. By day, he’s a software engineer at Oracle.

As I point out, “It is very difficult for a country that has no history or experience with a sport to excel at it.” So instead, we simply imported centuries of history and expertise. And if we can do that with cricket, we can do it with anything else—as we have done all along.

You want to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb? Bring in a bunch of German Jews, a few Italians, and definitely some Hungarians. The Manhattan Project was built on the work of refugees. It’s one of the great self-owns of history that the fascists drove a bunch of Europe’s top scientists into the arms of the Allies.

Similarly, if you want to beat the Soviets to the Moon, grab all the best German rocket scientists. One of the keys to America’s post-World War II ascendancy isn’t about traditional values or good old American ingenuity. It’s about the ingenuity of new Americans and the benefits of the wartime and postwar migration of European talent.

The lesson for today is pretty clear.

Unfortunately, this is not a lesson anybody seems to want to hear right now. As I observe, “If we want to make America great again, we need to make immigration great again. But somehow the people who claim to be interested in doing the former are dogmatically opposed to the latter.”

Read the whole thing.

The U.S. Cricket Team’s Guide to Winning at Everything

The $7 Trillion Subsidy

The rejoinder you will often hear, even frome some otherwise sensible portions of the right, is that you can’t have both a welfare state and immigration.

Bryan Caplan has an interesting post criticizing Milton Friedman for endorsing this idea, pointing out that it amounts to the rule you can’t achieve one increase in freedom without achieving every other increase in freedom at the same time. In effect, the free-market utopia has to be achieved all at once or not at all—which is not how things ever work.

In passing, though, Caplan makes what is actually a bigger and more important observation: “Once you realize that the welfare state is primarily about helping the old, not the poor, it turns out that immigration may be the only way for aging countries to sustain their welfare states.” In other words, Friedman got the economics of immigration backward.