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Do you want the USA to be No. 1? Do you want us to lead the world in, well, pretty much everything, from sports and entertainment to manufacturing and technology?
Then let me introduce you to a group of guys who are helping to make this dream come true. The U.S. national cricket team—and yes, we have one—just posted an upset win over Pakistan [ [link removed] ] in a T20 World Cup match in Grand Prairie, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. For the benefit of those who know even less about cricket than I do, Pakistan is one of cricket’s major world powers, and for them to lose to the U.S. is akin to a Double-A team showing up out of nowhere and trouncing the Yankees. It astonished the world—and was briefly even noticed [ [link removed] ] in America.
There is an old joke about the difference between the English and American approach to sports. The English invent games that are then adopted by the rest of the world—cricket, rugby, and what they call football and we call soccer—and then they continually lose at these sports because they are competing against the best athletic talent around the globe. Americans invent games that nobody else plays—baseball, basketball and our own version of football—and then we hold contests against each other and proclaim ourselves “world champions.” Our cricket win goes against that pattern. This is about Americans winning in a sport that has billions of fans, almost all of them outside the United States.
Now consider this. 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.
That’s a bit of a sticky wicket [ [link removed] ] because immigration is not an answer that anyone seems to want to hear right now. But I’m not bowling a wicked googly [ [link removed] ]. The case is pretty straightforward.
The H-1B Team
The joke that immediately made the rounds after the surprise U.S. 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 U.S. cricket team is dominated by Indian immigrants who are here on H-1B visas [ [link removed] ], 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, on an H-1B visa, of course.
It is very difficult for a country that has no history or experience with a sport to excel at it. Athletic skills are developed through constant repetition at a young age and depend on generations of kids playing in their backyards and in youth leagues. At the very least, people simply have to know what the sport is and what its rules are. Any reasonably complex game is going to seem straightforward to people who grew up on it—and impossibly complicated to those who didn’t. I grew up playing Little League, so the rules of baseball are ingrained in my head. But I have been the recipient of several earnest attempts by friends from India and the Caribbean to explain the rules of cricket, and I cannot say that any of it has sunk in.
Even cricket’s South Asian powerhouses took a long time to compete on the world stage. India and Pakistan picked up cricket in the 19th century under British colonial rule, but India didn’t participate in an international match until 1932 and didn’t win a “test” match until 1952. It only started to become a dominant team in the 1970s.
America has none of this history. I have already imparted to you the complete sum of my cricket knowledge. (For more, see an explainer in this CNN article [ [link removed] ]. It is probably accurate, but I couldn’t tell.) As a shocked Pakistan fan complained [ [link removed] ], “How can we, with our cricketing history, lose to a country that doesn’t even have cricket in its DNA?” But here’s the thing: America is not a country defined by its DNA—not biologically, and not culturally. We can always import new DNA to add to the mix, which we have been doing for centuries and continue to do today. One of the more recent of these strands is the growing and very successful South Asian diaspora, which creates the basis and the market for success in cricket.
The U.S. cricket team has six players hailing from all around India [ [link removed] ]. One was born in Alabama while his father was going to college here, which makes him a birthright citizen; the others are here on visas. The rest of the team consists of immigrants from former British colonies like Australia and South Africa, and the children of immigrants from the Caribbean. Immigration is the superpower by which America imported centuries of cricket-playing experience to a country that abandoned cricket in the 1850s.
How To Be No. 1
There is an obvious lesson from this. If you want the U.S. to become No. 1 in anything, import the talent for it. It’s not even a new lesson, and it’s not just about sports.
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 [ [link removed] ]. 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 [ [link removed] ]. 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.
For example, do we want to regain our dominance in manufacturing microchips, a key strategic technology in a digital economy? We could dole out a lot of money in subsidies for chip fabrication facilities. But that’s like throwing a lot of money at a cricket team in a country where nobody knows how to play cricket.
Immigration is already important to America’s dominance in technology. Just look at the top level of executives at Alphabet and Microsoft—both [ [link removed] ] of whom [ [link removed] ] are, not coincidentally, avid cricket fans. But expertise in software doesn’t translate to the highly complex specialty of chipmaking. What we need is to import the best existing experience in microchip manufacturing.
The Economic Innovation Group has proposed [ [link removed] ] a “chipmaker’s visa”—in effect, handing out green cards to people with the expertise we need. Here is their case:
Semiconductor production is incredibly complex, and at all stages requires a workforce that is not just highly skilled but also possesses hands-on experience. Consequently, international engineers at TSMC, Samsung, and other manufacturers represent a “critical competitive advantage in the chipmaking industry,” and requiring the US industry to grow solely using the domestic workforce would deprive manufacturers of critically important workers who possess the on-the-ground knowledge necessary for success immediately. …
Even utilizing the existing pipeline of skilled workers being produced by US universities is dependent on high-skilled immigration, as roughly two-thirds of US graduate students in fields relevant to chipmaking are foreign-born. The status quo for these students already hampers US competitiveness as major flaws in the current immigration system are allowing these students to be successfully recruited by other countries with better functioning high-skilled immigration systems.
That brings us back to the sticky wicket of U.S. immigration policy.
Make Immigration Great Again
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.
Ironically, that even includes a child of Indian immigrants named Vivek Ramaswamy, who claims [ [link removed] ] he wants to dismantle the very system of birthright citizenship that makes him eligible to run for office. There’s a long-established pattern in which immigrant families, denounced as foreign invaders by the nativists of their day, become nativists themselves within two generations. Ramaswamy, an ambitious fellow, has decided to shorten this to one generation.
Even the other side of the political spectrum doesn’t currently regard immigration as a pressing issue. Terrified of further erosion in their old blue-collar voter base, Democrats under President Biden have been talking up greater enforcement of immigration controls.
The politics on this issue is all backwards. Our most pressing need is not less immigration, but more. If we only want to make America great again so long as we can do it with the right kind of people—the “right” kind usually being “whoever immigrated before me”—we’ll be missing a lot of what made America great in the first place.
The Brooklyn Bridge was built by a German immigrant family [ [link removed] ]. The “Great American Songbook [ [link removed] ],” a collection of American popular music that defined the mid-20th century, was largely composed by first- and second-generation Eastern European immigrants such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. At every stage in our history, as a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent recently reminded us, immigrants have gotten the job done [ [link removed] ].
And now we get to chant “USA! USA!” at a cricket game. Why not? If Americans can win at cricket, we can win at everything—if we’re willing to embrace the immigrant talent that has made and will continue to make America great.

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