While too rapid a rate of immigration can cause social problems, over the long term, immigration strengthens US power...The fact that people want to come to the US enhances its appeal, and immigrants’ upward mobility is attractive to people in other countries. The US is a magnet, and many people can envisage themselves as Americans, in part because so many successful Americans look like them. Moreover, connections between immigrants and their families and friends back home help to convey accurate and positive information about the US.

When it comes to table tennis, the United States is not exactly a world power. At the elite level, immigrant talent has long been welcomed. The entire American team at the 2008 Beijing Olympics was born in China. But an immigration case involving an Iranian table tennis player has raised question about exactly what status an international athlete must achieve before being granted preferential entry into the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced the addition of Taiwan to the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). However, key U.S. allies and friends continue to be left waiting to join the VWP. These delays make little sense given the extensive benefits that VWP expansion offers the U.S. in terms of national security, the economy, and public diplomacy.

Immigrants' passion for America warps plans and bends dreams. My Pakistani parents realized that America changed their approach to life, just as it has changed everything else it has touched. American freedom is even helping (slowly) moderate latter-day Islam.

China is steadily gaining the hard power that comes from factories and finance.... But lasting influence in the world has come more from soft than hard power: ideas for living, models of individual, commercial, and social life that people emulate because they are attracted rather than because they are compelled.

When America admits migrants, it is not diluting its own culture, but spreading its ideals across the world. No other country has such influence. The closest contender, the European Union, wields tremendous soft power by letting neighboring countries join, as fifteen (mostly Eastern European) states have since the end of the cold war.

In the Lisbon Summit (2010), NATO decided to use Soft Power (the term which belongs to Joseph Samuel Nye – Harvard University Professor) for stabilisation of the Western Balkan Countries in the new millenium because it is not only cheaper and effective, but also this strategy brings long-range stability to the region and provides prosperity and more democratic rights to these nations.

One of the main reasons why they are successful in America is because of our system. Governor Brown and his allies in Sacramento should advocate an American foreign policy that reorients itself to the soft power of exporting American values and know-how so the Sotomayors, Brins, Omidyars and Zakarias in Puerto Rico, Russia, Iran and India can find success at home.