Chinese is too difficult of a language.

I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.

Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.

Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.

Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.

Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.

You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.

Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.

Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.

China is trying. Around the time the US announced restrictions on the H-1B visa, China announced the K visa for attracting immigrants [1].

At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years?

[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...

The importance of immigrant “talent” is clearly overstated. Japan became a powerhouse in the 20th century with virtually no immigration and a significantly smaller population than the US. China is becoming a technological powerhouse with no immigration as well.

Well, China has a tremendous pool of people to pull talent from. Do they need immigrants? Or just continue the path of “building it in-house”?

They're to migrating to America any more either, that's the point. So no, the US has no advantage, on current trajectory it'll increasingly only have 'native' talent and some of that may choose to move elsewhere.

If the U.S. is losing talent to anywhere else in the world isn’t it losing a relative advantage or increasing a relative disadvantage with China, even if China is not the one benefiting from the lost talent?

> I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.

Learning mandarin is the major blocker imo, more people would move if the language was easier.

> If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent.

I wouldn't go that far, Chinese espionage is a very real thing, with industry secrets being some of the top targets.

China doesn't need those other people because Chinese people are naturally smarter than them, generally. If that idea makes you uncomfortable, just look at the data and you'll agree.