How the US can drain China’s brain

The prospect of a military conflict with the United States is not what keeps Chinese leader Xi Jinping up at night.

Instead, Xi fears an American technology blockade will derail his country’s development, leading China’s best and brightest to emigrate abroad. That’s why the U.S. should repurpose its visa and asylum systems as national security tools. Given a choice, many Chinese scientists and engineers would rather live in a free country. We should encourage them to relocate here to undercut Xi’s grand strategy and help maintain America’s competitive tech advantage.

Xi has long stressed technology and innovation as essential components in transforming China into an economic and military powerhouse. At a 2020 symposium attended by China’s top scientists, Xi underscored how China requires scientific solutions to “boost economic and social development, as well as improve people’s living standards.” During China’s recently concluded party congress, Xi went further, noting that China must “regard science and technology as our primary productive forces, talent as our primary resource, and innovation as our primary driver of growth.”

Xi has matched his words with action, investing billions to develop strategic talent pipelines in critical sectors, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. By some estimates , China now produces more Ph.D. graduates in science, technology, engineering, and math fields than the U.S. Thousands of other Chinese students graduate with STEM degrees from American universities, although that number declined during the pandemic. No doubt, some of these Chinese students were sent here for nefarious purposes. China’s military sponsors promising students to study at U.S. and foreign universities, with the understanding they will return to China to provide the technology and talent Beijing needs to compete with Washington. Such exchange and research partnerships support China’s military-civil fusion strategy, which centers on acquiring the world’s cutting-edge technologies, including through theft, to achieve Chinese military dominance.

But while untold numbers of Chinese STEM students assume positions within China’s military-industrial complex, many others, having experienced life in an open and prosperous society, elect to stay. These talented immigrants fill jobs in fields such as medicine and engineering, all the while contributing to the American economy and enriching our communities. Many also speak out about Chinese autocracy, so much so that Beijing has gone to great lengths to silence them, even forcibly repatriating dissidents deemed a threat.

Fortunately, the U.S. has a long history of taking in waves of highly skilled scientists at its rivals’ expense. That includes welcoming Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany and recruiting Nazi scientists to support America’s atomic and missile programs. America similarly lured Soviet defectors to the U.S. during the height of the Cold War. Studies reveal they had an outsize impact on U.S. technological development and economic productivity, in essence cementing America’s superpower status.

The challenge facing U.S. policymakers centers on attracting top Chinese talent while also ensuring that our cutting-edge innovations are not transferred back to China. This is particularly true given that the Chinese government often threatens and intimidates the family members of those who relocate abroad. Part of the brain drain strategy lies in clearing the current backlog of H-1B visas for high-skilled immigrants. These are people who are sponsored by U.S. companies for specific, hard-to-train roles, a disproportionate amount of which are in STEM-related fields.

Another option would be to rethink America’s asylum laws to encourage highly skilled Chinese defectors, offering them permanent residence and later citizenship in exchange for relocating to America. To limit Beijing’s ability to harass these defectors’ families, they should be able to bring one or both of their parents with them to the U.S. Owing to China’s long-standing one-child policy, most asylum applicants are unlikely to have siblings — therefore, these programs should not exacerbate concerns about chain migration.

Of course, a great deal of effort will be needed to vet asylum applicants appropriately, as well as blunt attempts by China’s security services to seed bad actors into the asylum process. And it goes without saying that unvetted immigrants should not be immediately placed into sensitive national security positions, in the same way that unvetted Americans should not be either. But if Washington cannot manage to devise enhanced immigrant screening processes aimed at ensuring America’s technological competitiveness, there is little hope it can successfully wage a protracted great-power rivalry with Beijing. That’s just a fact.

Going forward, as Xi signals plans to build up China’s science and technology cadre, the U.S. should listen — and then work aggressively to undermine his grand technological vision. Such a strategy would not only be the stuff of Xi’s nightmares. It would also benefit the U.S., too.