What if China, flushed with its new wealth, opened its doors to mass immigration? It would make sense from an economic and social point of view, because its one-child-per-family policy has produced a young generation far smaller than the one that now does most of the work. China’s population is ‘ageing’ — its average age is going up — faster than any other country in history, and it could certainly do with some more young people.

If it had an immigration policy like that of the United States of America, it could fill all the gaping holes in the workforce that will open up when the present adult generation retires, and there would be enough people working and paying taxes to support that older generation in its ‘golden years’. Otherwise, there will barely be one worker for each retirer, and his post-retirement years will be far from golden.

So let’s suppose China opens the gates. The immigrants would come, from all over the world. Probably most would be from South and Southeast Asia (India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines), but plenty of Russians would come too. So would Arabs from the slums of Cairo, and Congolese from the slums of Kinshasa, and Mexicans fleeing the bloody war on drugs. There would be young Europeans coming too, fleeing the 25-to-50 per cent youth unemployment rates of Spain, Italy and Greece. Some Americans would also come, like former automobile workers from ‘Rust-Belt’ states hoping that their skills would find employment in what is now the world’s biggest car-maker. China’s politics wouldn’t deter them; they have already tried being free and poor, and some of them would be willing to trade.

In 50 or 60 years, China would be one of the world’s most diverse societies. Almost all the new immigrants would learn to speak some Chinese, of course, but their children would be fluent in the language. Indeed, they would think of themselves as Chinese, even though their skins were white, brown or black and their faiths Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or Hindu. Some tens of millions of them would already have intermarried with ethnic Chinese, if only because there are tens of millions of young Chinese men who will otherwise remain unmarried. (The Chinese have been killing too many of their baby girls.) And everybody would live more or less happily ever after.

Good mix

I know. It’s never going to happen, because the Chinese would never let it happen. But that’s precisely the point. The Americans have let it happen. Why? I’m not saying it is a bad thing. But it is an extraordinary thing. Sixty years ago, the US was a country whose population was overwhelmingly of white European descent. The only big minority was the black and mixed-race descendants of African slaves, who accounted for about one-eighth of the population. And then the US opened the gates very wide.

Last month, the US Census Bureau revealed that non-white births in the country narrowly exceeded the number of births to white Americans for the first time. There are some curious kinks in the statistics, such as the fact that Spanish-speaking whites are not counted as white, but the message is clear: the next adult generation in the US will not have a white majority. So why did the last two generations of Americans, who were still mostly of European descent, let it happen?

One explanation that sounds plausible is that it was about fairness. As descendants of immigrants themselves, they felt that they could not deny others the same opportunities. Maybe the last two generations of Americans were a lot less racist than many people thought. Or perhaps they were all silently aware that only 500 years ago, none of the births in North America were white.