Login
A new study finds that anti-LGBTQ+ policies are linked to depression in Black and Latinx youth in the United States. The study analyzed discriminatory policies, such as “Don’t Say Gay” laws and other indicators that may affect this group and found that LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx youth are more likely to be depressed than their peers in the most LGBTQ+ affirming states.
Conducted by lead author Dr. Skyler Jackson, an assistant professor of Public Health, the data takes into account individual experiences of bullying based on race and ethnicity or sexual orientation. 
Dr. Skyler Jackson
“We felt the study was necessary because we know that groups that face stigma and discrimination face it not only in their everyday lives, but also because of unjust laws and policies that shaped their everyday lives," said Jackson. "And we wanted to design a study that allowed us to capture the compounding and sometimes intersectional effects of all of these forms of discrimination in their lives.”
The research found that Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ youth in states without protections – such as anti-bullying legislation and conversion therapy bans – are 32 percent more likely to experience symptoms of depression.
For Jackson, it was necessary to take a nontraditional approach to this research that often starts with the broadest population and then overtime, hone in on specific subgroups. He said that his team began with a specific group and researched and analyzed the unique needs, barriers, resiliency and challenges that they face.
“Nearly every day there are laws being considered or passed that are impacting the lives of queer and trans individuals,” said Tyler Harvey, program administrator at the Yale School of Medicine’s SEICHE Center for Health and Justice and co-author of the study. “And what this study shows in addition to the very limited existing evidence, is that those laws and policies with social environments in which queer and trans people exist within have very real impacts on their health, and in this case, their mental health.”
The study includes a map that researchers believe is the first youth-focused U.S. state-level measure of anti-LGBTQ+ structural stigma, said Jackson. On the map, states are ranked based on nine anti-LGBTQ+ structural stigma indicators specifically relevant to youth. The indictors that were considered harmful included “Don’t Say Gay” laws and anti-LGBTQ+ community attitudes. .
Harvey said that gender-sexuality alliances were an interesting and important indicator of the mental health of youth. Regardless of participation, having an alliance near this subgroup acts as a symbol of affirmation of the school supporting youth’s gender or sexuality.
The Trevor Project, a youth LGBTQ centered organization, revealed that LGBTQ youth who found their school to be LGBTQ affirming, reported lower rates of attempted suicide. This survey also showed that 45 percent of LGBTQ youth have seriously considered suicide in 2022. Last year, 16 percent of Latinx LGBTQ youth attempted suicide as well as 19 percent of Black youth in comparison to the 12 percent of white youth.
Dr. Kirsty Clark, an assistant professor of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, said that by taking an intersectional angle to this study, the researchers have advanced the understanding of these different identities.
“It is important we consider the experiences of youth holding multiple marginalized identities including Black and Latinx LGBTQ youth,” said Clark, who added that much of the research to date that examines the influence of factors like social policies and bullying on LGBTQ youth mental health, has been conducted in majority-white samples ."Research that takes an intersectional approach by centering the identities and experiences of Black and Latinx LGBTQ youth can help to advance understanding of how multi-level influences can work to harm youth mental health,” she added.
Veronica Fernandez-Alvarado can be reached at [email protected]
Sometime in the mid-1990s, a half-Italian cousin of mine who resided in a real, live castle outside Florence took a break from majestic existence to visit Texas, where my family and I were then living.
I must have been about 14. My cousin was slightly younger, and had made the transatlantic crossing with a prized possession in tow: a book about former fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who met his ignominious demise in 1945.
As I recall, my cousin’s American mother regarded the text as an embarrassing accessory that was not to be flaunted in public and especially not among non-Italian audiences.
Fast forward a few decades, and fascist nostalgia is going strong in Italy – where many Italians are not too embarrassed about it at all. Italian Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa, for example, keeps a statuette of Mussolini in his home along with other items of fascist décor. Earlier this year, he took it upon himself to announce that “there is no mention of anti-Fascism” in Italy’s constitution.
La Russa belongs to the far-right party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), which he helped found in 2012 with Giorgia Meloni, the country’s current prime minister. Back in 1996, Meloni had her own Mussolini moment, declaring in an interview: “I think Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
In September 2006, I paid my first visit to Lebanon, arriving 34 days after the 34-day summer assault by the Israeli military that had killed some 1,200 people in the country.
While Israel was subsequently revealed to have planned the war in advance, the alleged casus belli was the cross-border kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, which had intended to use them as bargaining chips to secure the release of Arab prisoners in Israeli jails.
I was 24 years old, and it was my first up-close view of Israeli military handiwork: decimated villages, bombed-out bridges, craters in the ground where apartment buildings had once stood.
The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury would describe the scene as follows: “It is devastation. It is a pure devastation that is like nothing you have ever seen—apart from devastation. Ruins stretching to the horizon, challenging the sky.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
Last year, the United States Department of Homeland Security advertised the impending “deployment” on the US-Mexico border of “robot dogs”. According to a celebratory feature article published on the department’s website, the goal of the programme was to “force-multiply” the presence of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as well as to “reduce human exposure to life-threatening hazards”.
In case there was any doubt as to which human lives were of concern, the article specified: “The American Southwest is a region that blends a harsh landscape, temperature extremes and various other non-environmental threats that can create dangerous obstacles for those who patrol the border.”
There is no denying that the US-Mexico border is an inhospitable place; just ask the countless refuge seekers who have died trying to navigate it, thanks in large part to ongoing US efforts to effectively criminalise the very right to asylum. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
Twenty years ago, in 2003, I left the United States with no particular agenda aside from leaving the United States – which despite being my country of birth I found to be a terribly psychologically unsettling place. That same year, the US military had gone about pulverising Iraq and its people under the guidance of President George W Bush, who had subsequently found the whole affair to be highly amusing.
As a young child in Washington, DC and its environs, my envisioned future had entailed living with my parents forever, and I had beleaguered my mother with worried questions about how old she would be when I was 20, how old she would be when I was 25, and so on.
As things shaped up in adulthood, however, any potential for a sedentary existence was quickly swept away in favour of extended international hitchhiking expeditions and general continuous movement between countries – a frenetic itinerance that was of course only enabled by the privileged passport provided to me by the nation I was avoiding at all cost. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
At an April 14 news conference in Washington, DC, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) chief Anne Milgram sounded the alarm about the country’s latest appointed public enemy number one: four Mexican guys known as “Los Chapitos”, the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Declaring El Chapo’s offspring “responsible for the massive influx” into the United States of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, Milgram insisted: “Let me be clear that the Chapitos pioneered the manufacture and trafficking of the deadliest drug our country has ever faced.”
As if this were not news enough, the DEA chief threw in some additional alleged trivia, according to which the Chapitos had “fed their enemies alive to tigers, electrocuted them, [and] waterboarded them” – activities the likes of which the US has obviously never perpetrated against its own enemies.
There is no debating the deadliness of fentanyl, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin. Drug overdoses, the majority of them fentanyl-related, are now killing more than 100,000 people a year in the US. Entire communities have been devastated.
And yet it is curious that the Chapitos are spontaneously to blame for the whole fentanyl epidemic – although the new narrative certainly comes in handy when justifying the continuing frenzied militarisation of the US-Mexico border. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
Imagine, for a moment, that the government of Cuba was demanding the extradition of an Australian publisher in the United Kingdom for exposing Cuban military crimes. Imagine that these crimes had included a 2007 massacre by helicopter-borne Cuban soldiers of a dozen Iraqi civilians, among them two journalists for the Reuters news agency.
Now imagine that, if extradited from the UK to Cuba, the Australian publisher would face up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison, simply for having done what media professionals are ostensibly supposed to do: report reality.
Finally, imagine the reaction of the United States to such Cuban conduct, which would invariably consist of impassioned squawking about human rights and democracy and a call for the universal vilification of Cuba.
Of course, it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to deduce that the above scenario is a rearranged version of true events, and that the publisher in question is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The antagonising nation is not Cuba but rather the US itself, which is responsible for not only the obliteration of Assange’s individual human rights but also a stunning array of far more macro-level assaults on people across the world. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
On April 8, three young Venezuelan men were detained in El Paso, Texas, where they had just crossed the border from Ciudad Júarez, Mexico. They were among the 183,000 undocumented people reportedly apprehended by the United States Border Patrol that month, which, according to the Reuters news agency, constituted a 13 percent increase from March.
I had met these three men in February in Panama when they had emerged with their three Colombian travel companions from the traumatic stretch of corpse-ridden jungle known as the Darién Gap. Over the next month and a half, we seven had remained in continuous contact on WhatsApp, and I had undertaken an informal fundraising campaign that consisted of harassing wealthy acquaintances to send me money that I could transfer to my friends to help offset the costs of undocumented movement.
Chief among these costs is the official extortion that currently reigns in Central America and Mexico. Police, immigration personnel and other state agents have wholeheartedly embraced the same sinister logic as criminal outfits that prey on asylum seekers – a logic that is based on extracting cash from people who have none to spare and who are often migrating for that very reason.
Of course, the blame for the whole twisted arrangement lies fundamentally with my own country, the United States, the unilateral sanctity of whose border has spawned a flourishing international anti-migrant industry and rendered the business of seeking refuge a very deadly one. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
On February 17, large demonstrations rocked Paramaribo, the capital of the South American nation and former Dutch colony of Suriname. Thousands of people took to the streets to protest against government corruption, runaway inflation, and the decision by President Chan Santokhi to end state subsidies for electricity, fuel and other essential items.
As one might have guessed, the elimination of subsidies is taking place under the charitable guidance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has long specialised in addressing international economic crises by increasing the misery of the poorest echelons of society.
Suriname’s current IMF loan and debt-restructuring programme is but one of the many dubious achievements of Santokhi, who upon assuming office in 2020 went about having his wife appointed to an assortment of lucrative positions, including to the supervisory board of the state oil company Staatsolie. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
Once upon a time, George W Bush – former governor of Texas, 43rd United States president and accused war criminal – made a worrying observation: “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”
Bush did have a point; after all, that question is indeed rarely asked, at least not by people with a command of English grammar. And yet it is a question that increasingly comes to mind these days, and particularly today on World Book Day, as the US state of Texas leads the country in a book-banning frenzy.
According to the literary and free expression advocacy organisation PEN America, between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, a total of 1,586 book bans took place in school libraries and classrooms across 26 US states. Texas was at the vanguard with 713 bans, followed by Pennsylvania with 456, Florida with 204 and Oklahoma with 43.
Heavily targeted for removal were books featuring LGBTQIA+ themes and characters as well as texts dealing with structural racism in US society – actions that naturally only reinforce the bigoted and malevolent foundations of the so-called “land of the free”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
On March 27, 40 men were killed in a fire at a migrant detention centre in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. The victims hailed from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela.
Like so many thousands of refuge seekers from around the world, they had been jailed in Mexico for the crime of aspiring to a better life in the United States – which forces its southern neighbour to act as deputy gatekeeper and migrant antagonist.
I arrived in Ciudad Juárez 10 days after the fire. An altar with candles, flowers, and portraits of the deceased had been erected in front of the detention centre’s charred façade. There I spoke with a young Venezuelan man who had lost a friend in the blaze and who had since been camping out in the cold next to the shrine.
Pulling out his battered phone, he showed me a TikTok tribute to his friend – a man with a big smile and a little son in Venezuela – as well as a series of photos of a pigeon who had recently come to pay respects at the altar. The images of the bird prompted a tender reflection from my interlocutor: “They are such delicate creatures.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
Here we go again. The state of Israel is committing unchecked barbarism against Palestinians and the Western corporate media has decided it all comes down to “clashes”.
The latest round of so-called “clashes” – sparked when Israeli police decided to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan by repeatedly attacking Palestinian worshippers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque – has produced predictably disproportionate casualties.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested and wounded as Israeli forces have once again flaunted their handiness with rubber bullets, batons, stun grenades and tear gas. In return, the police have suffered minimal injuries, while also undertaking to accompany illegal Israeli settlers into the mosque compound.
And apparently not satisfied with simply unleashing violence in Jerusalem, Israel has also launched a barrage of air strikes on the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon following reported rocket fire.
As with all previous instances of Israeli-Palestinian “clashes”, the media’s choice to deploy such terminology serves to obscure the Israeli monopoly on violence and the fact that Israel kills, maims and mutilates at an astronomically higher rate than its supposed counterpart in “clashing”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
In February my friend Michelle visited me in the coastal village of Zipolite in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state, where I have been semi-residing since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
I had last seen Michelle in Kazakhstan in 2014, when we were still in our 30s and I had descended briefly upon her apartment in the Kazakh capital of Astana before darting off to Lebanon and Vietnam. This pre-pandemic modus operandi of manic international itinerance had been driven by a combination of factors, including an apparent desire to thwart the passage of time by remaining in constant motion and a need to avoid my psychologically destructive homeland, the United States, at all cost.
Time passed anyway, of course. Michelle returned home to Washington; I ended up temporarily sedentary in Mexico, and we both entered our 40s. . . .
Our 2023 reunion began with requisite reminiscences of nearly freezing to death in the Kazakh countryside, patronising all-night karaoke bars, and placing our palms in the gilded handprint of then-dictator of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev in Astana’s looming Bayterek monument.
Michelle then filled me in on the homeland gossip from Washington – my own birthplace – where, she reported, she had found herself in the regular company of a much younger crowd. And it was in the context of this conversation that she remarked that she sometimes felt the urge to apologise for having wrinkles around her eyes.
This got me to thinking, as Michelle seemed to have articulated something I subconsciously felt – even though I had never considered myself overly concerned with physical upkeep. . . .When I thought about it candidly, however, I recognised an arc of guilt that had accompanied the ageing process and realised that I, too, felt reflexively apologetic whenever my gray hairs were too visible or my eyes looked tired. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
In my previous article, I explained five ideas. First, that computer chips are the fundamental building block of the modern economy, much more so than oil. Second, that because of the enormous economies of scale in the industry, semiconductor production—especially of the most advanced ones—is incredibly concentrated in Taiwan and South Korea, a region with high geostrategic instability. Third, that the United States controls the most important part of the value added in the semiconductor industry (since the physical production of semiconductors is only one step in the industry, which also requires design, software, etc.). Fourth, that for the past decade, China has been trying to capture a larger share of this global value added. And fifth, given the military repercussions of the Asian giant’s progress in semiconductor production, the United States launched an aggressive and unusual campaign of restrictions on the export of technology in this sector to China, with the announcement of new regulations on October 7, 2022, which heralded a new stage in the world economy.
Today I will explain how we have arrived at this situation and outline future prospects for the coming years. It is a complex story, which I will have to summarize and—much to my regret—in some cases simplify (a more extensive treatment appears in Chris Miller’s 2022 book, Chips War, although events have accelerated since the book’s publication).
Recent History
For many decades, U.S. semiconductor policy was relatively lax. The idea was that the U.S. could always “run faster” and stay two generations ahead of its competitors with semiconductors (this strategy was called “sliding scale”). Though the cheapest semiconductors were manufactured in East Asia, this benefited American companies, which could control their production costs and keep the most profitable links of the value-added chains (programming, marketing, etc.) in the United States. In addition, this division of labor helped to foster strategic allies surrounding China (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan).
This U.S. policy had one exception: the Soviet Union. From the American perspective, limiting the Soviet Union’s access to the most advanced technology meant that Soviet military forces could not adequately compete. In reality, the only real advantages of export limitations on the Soviet Union were rhetorical. Its socialist system was so flawed at its roots that it could never support a powerful semiconductor industry. Much of East Germany’s economic ruin came precisely from trying to mass-produce semiconductors under a system as absurd as a centrally-planned economy.
Most of your material possessions, except for your house, are probably not made in your home country—from the electronic device you are using to read this to the clothes you are wearing
These pragmatic considerations (advantages of the international division of labor, aid to East Asian economies, the inefficiency of socialism) were complemented by economic ideas that in the 1980s and 1990s emphasized the advantages of international trade and distrusted governmental industrial policy. As Michael Boskin once, evidently, said: “Potato chips, computer chips—what’s the difference?”
Boskin had a point. Look around you, dear reader. Most of your material possessions, except for your house, are probably not made in your home country—from the electronic device you are using to read this to the clothes you are wearing. This incredible internationalization of the economy has also meant, for instance, that for my home country, Spain, we have been able to emerge from the morass of economic autarky that resulted from decades of misguided policies. Internationalization works, and Spain is the best example: in 1960, Argentina had a per capita income 19 percent higher than ours, today Spain enjoys more than double Argentina’s per capita income.
The problem, of course, is that international trade is a very good idea when your partner does not intend to use the profits from this trade to undermine your national security. There is no perfect trading partner (as there is no perfect person) and every partner is going to overstep the mark on more than one occasion (as Spanish, Danish, or Slovakian companies often do). But everything is a question of proportionality. Driving at 26 mph in a 25-mph zone is not the same as driving at 190 mph.
Yes, Japanese or Korean companies often overdid it in the ’80s and ’90s, but all within a basically reasonable margin. Even China, from the beginning of its economic reform in 1979 until about 2012, behaved in a way that could be accommodated by international trade rules. Again, I stress, China was not perfect, but no other nation was.
As I pointed out in my previous article, the problem is that Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 with the idea of breaking the deal. Xi distrusts international rules (both political and economic). He thinks that the United States is in terminal decline, that Europe is a pygmy obsessed with irrelevant issues such as human rights and democracy, and that the time has come for China to retake its rightful place in international relations, merited by its history, population, and economy. Moreover, this repositioning must be done through the iron grip of the Communist Party, which is the only institution that, in his opinion, can ensure China’s future. And all this, of course, involves semiconductors: the backbone of the entire modern economy.
In 2014 and 2015, the United States began to realize that Xi is different from his predecessors. The final years of Obama’s presidency marked growing concern over China’s new aggressive style, both internally (increased repression, massive concentration camps in Xinjiang) and externally. Suddenly, the question seemed no longer to be whether Chinese companies are going to take a 5-percent market share from them in the semiconductor industry in a somewhat crooked way. Instead, it was about a geostrategic rival that wants to reorganize the world map.
The Opening Shot
Although the details of this shift in U.S. foreign policy are complex, for our issue, semiconductors, the opening shot was fired in October 2016 when Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker warned in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., that there are “new attempts by China to acquire companies and technology based on their government’s interests—not commercial objectives.” And before that, “The U.S. government will make clear to China’s leaders at every opportunity that we will not accept a $150-billion industrial policy designed to appropriate this industry.”
The unexpected electoral victory of Donald Trump a few days after Penny Pritzker’s speech reinforces this new vision. There is a fundamental and underappreciated continuity in U.S. foreign policy from Obama’s second term through Trump to Biden.
The first battle in this U.S.–China standoff centered on ZTE and Huawei. These two companies specialized in telecommunications equipment, a particularly tricky subject. Several European governments learned during the last few years that their ministers’ cell phones had been hacked and their private conversations spied on by unknown third parties. The problem here was not just that ZTE and Huawei violated too many intellectual property rules and skirted sanctions on Iran and North Korea, but that both companies had close relationships with the Chinese government—one being semi-public and the other with opaque shareholding.
ZTE was fined in 2017 for selling banned equipment to Iran and North Korea, and after much back and forth, the company remains sanctioned in the United States, with a recent prohibition on exporting telecommunications equipment. The case of Huawei is similar, with a ban on purchases of this company’s products by the federal government in 2018 and additional sanctions in the years that followed. There was the issue of controlling such an important technology as 5G, where Huawei had significant advantages. And in 2022 it was SMIC’s turn to be banned, due to its close links with the Chinese armed forces.
China’s reaction to this first battle was interesting. Of course, it complained in public and protested to international organizations (there are complex issues here of international trade law and the jurisdiction of the World Trade Organization). But on the whole, there was little retaliation. Did Xi think that this was not the time to escalate the confrontation? Or that perhaps the United States would tire of these battles, as the price of phones and other telecommunications equipment went up, and the sanctions would fade over time, especially given Trump’s volatile nature? Or did he think simply that the sanctions were not very effective and therefore not worth fighting over?
Then came COVID and everything accelerated. In a production-constrained world, securing semiconductor supply was a clearer priority than ever. Significantly, one of the few companies to receive exemptions from the draconian COVID containment policy by the Chinese government was Yangtze Memory Technologies. Moreover, we all became aware of the lack of chips and the enormous risks that the concentration of production in Taiwan and South Korea carried in a world where the old rules of collective security were being pulverized by Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and China’s change of rhetoric regarding Taiwan.
And as in the 1980s, faddish ideas tend to reinforce these geostrategic tensions. Although the empirical evidence that industrial policy works is rather scant (for every example where it has worked, there are five examples of failure—a pretty bad batting average), it came back into vogue a few years ago in certain circles. My interpretation is that this resurrection of interest in industrial policy is based on a clear reality—that is, the poor productivity growth in many advanced economies since 2000 and the consequent stagnation of wages. But that diagnosis is incorrect (again, with a few exceptions): this stagnation has more to do with demographics than with any other factor.
New U.S. Strategy
It is the confluence of all these forces (economic, geostrategic, and ideological) that led Jack Sullivan, the National Security Advisor for the Biden administration, to give two key speeches, one on September 16, 2022 and another on October 12, 2022. I invite the reader to read the two speeches in their entirety. It is better to start with the second speech, which announced the new U.S. national security strategy, and then go to the first one, which, although delivered earlier, describes in more detail the specific measures regarding semiconductors.
Here are some of the fundamental ideas of these two speeches (I am merely summarizing what Sullivan said, not agreeing or disagreeing with it):
What does “small yard, high fence” mean? That, instead of establishing very broad restrictions on the export of technologies, in this case semiconductors, the United States is going to focus on creating very strong barriers (the “high fence”) at very specific pressure points (the “small yard”; for example, as I explained in my previous article, on extreme ultraviolet light photolithography machines and the lasers they use), which are essential in the manufacture of more advanced semiconductors. It is this “robust guardrails” strategy that is reflected in the October 7, 2022 restrictions.
My reading of the situation is that at least in the short term, the United States will control enough pressure points to make life seriously difficult for the Chinese semiconductor industry.
Will this new U.S. strategy work? There are several points to consider. First, the United States does not control all the most advanced technologies. In particular, we have the leading lithography company, ASML, located in the Netherlands; and a leading company in the silicon wafer industry, Tokyo Electron in Japan (the other three key companies here, Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA are U.S. companies and therefore fully subject to federal government restrictions).
The United States appears to have secured some government cooperation from the Netherlands and Japan, although its effectiveness remains to be seen. Technology companies have a long history of “obey but don’t comply” on these issues. ASML does not seem to be in the mood to be overly helpful, and since some of their equipment does not depend on U.S. patents that are subject to possible restrictions, they have a certain degree of freedom. Japan, on the other hand, with China on the prowl, appears to be more willing to cooperate with the United States. And then there is Taiwan, which is in a complicated situation: it neither wants to lose its technological advantage by setting up factories in the United States (which also makes it less important for the United States to defend), nor to unnecessarily provoke China.
My reading of the situation (while cautioning that I lack access to insider information on the trade secrets of these companies) is that at least in the short term, the United States will control enough pressure points to make life seriously difficult for the Chinese semiconductor industry.
How Will China React?
The second point to consider is China’s ability to react to these restrictions. I do not buy the argument made by opponents of the new export restrictions. They claim the restrictions will incentivize China to develop its own industry. But the reason the United States approves the sanctions is that China is already doing this. The incentive already existed! Perhaps it is stronger now, but the difference is marginal.
In the past, China has been very creative in solving its problems of access to forbidden technologies, as it did during the development of satellites in the 1990s (I recommend Hugo Meijer’s book about the U.S. restrictions on technological exports to China since 1979). This past success suggests that in a few years, China may have made up much of its backlog in semiconductor manufacturing, especially in a world of high technological diffusion. For example, RISC-V is a free hardware instruction set that has improved tremendously in recent years and may change the future of the industry for some time to come. There are no secrets in RISC-V: it’s all in the network.
If China catches up to the United States in 2030, rather than 2025 (to posit two arbitrary years), then thanks to restrictions, that is five years of additional geostrategic advantage. Foreign policy is about surviving tomorrow.
As before, this argument about China’s ability to catch up is often presented as a reason not to impose restrictions. Again, I believe this argument is flawed. From the U.S.’s perspective, any additional delay in China’s convergence on the technological frontier is a net gain. If China catches up to the United States in 2030, rather than 2025 (to posit two arbitrary years), then thanks to restrictions, that is five years of additional geostrategic advantage. Foreign policy is about surviving tomorrow. The day after tomorrow, we shall see.
But it is not just a question of short-sightedness or short-termism. The United States believes that the reputational cost with China of these new restrictions is small (relations were already broken, so there is not much “continuation value” to maintain) and that in the long term, the future is in its favor. Both demographically and in terms of social vitality, the U.S. is much better positioned than China (this book, and this other one, are two recent accounts of this perspective). My own more recent research on China suggests that the combination of perverse demographics and a clear drop in productivity growth predicts economically bad times in the 2030s for the Asian giant.
Considering these two points together, yes, the United States will be able to inflict damage on the Chinese semiconductor industry, and while this impact is not absolute, it is enough to justify embarking on this policy. In a world where there are no magic wands for anything, but only partial patches to complex problems, this is the policy that maximizes the benefits to the United States, at least in light of what we know right now.
This article is adapted from a version originally published in February 2023 at El Confidencial, a leading Spanish digital newspaper. We are grateful to Professor Jesús Fernández-Villaverde for his permission to publish it in English here, and to Thomas Howes for his translation.
In May, a 40-year-old woman – we’ll call her “Ana” – was arrested in downtown San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. She presided over a shabby bar and eatery in an area known as the Ex Biblioteca – or Ex-Library – a reference to the institution that had occupied the grounds prior to the devastating earthquake of October 1986.
Her family has not heard from her since.
Ana was detained for alleged gang ties, two months into the state of emergency that kicked off on March 27, 2022 in response to a spike in homicides occasioned by a collapse in negotiations between gangs and Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador and self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world”.
Over the past year, about 66,000 people have been imprisoned in accordance with the “emergency” – most of them condemned to indefinite detention and relieved of even the most basic rights. Many have nothing whatsoever to do with gangs aside from residing in a gang-saturated country. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
The first time I spoke with survivors of the Darién Gap – the notoriously deadly stretch of jungle on the border between Colombia and Panama – was in 2021 during my brief imprisonment in Siglo XXI, Mexico’s largest immigration detention centre, located in the Mexican state of Chiapas near the border with Guatemala.
I was the only detainee who hailed from the United States – the very country responsible for Mexico’s migration crackdown in the first place – and I had ended up in migrant jail purely on account of my own stupidity and laziness in renewing my tourist visa. My fellow inmates were facing rather more existential predicaments, and many of them – from Haiti, Cuba, Bangladesh, and beyond – had been forced to traverse the Darién Gap as they fled political and economic calamity in the hopes of eventually finding refuge in the US.
Within the walls of Siglo XXI, where dreams of refuge had been indefinitely put on hold, the Darién was a recurring topic of conversation – a sort of spontaneous exercise in group therapy, it seemed. Women recounted the numerous cadavers they had encountered during their journeys. Rape, it was clear, was rampant in the jungle – to the extent that even those who were not personally assaulted, were vicariously traumatised. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
Among the remaining bits of photographic evidence of a 2005 hitchhiking trip through Turkey is a shot of me lying in the back of the cab of a Turkish freight truck, clad in the same pink corduroy pants and blue sweater that I had been wearing for months. My hands are folded across my stomach, my eyebrows are raised, and the background is grey. The photo is blurry, having been taken while the truck was in motion by my hitchhiking companion Amelia, who had gotten the passenger’s seat for that portion of the trajectory.
It is not, in other words, a picture that would elicit any interest whatsoever in the current social media age – in which Instagram, Facebook, and the like have assumed the realm of reality and converted existence into a marketing competition to see whose life looks better on screen.
Travel influencers and other digital personalities expend all manner of time, resources, and photo-editing tools to produce images that are supposedly spontaneously and organically enchanting. Often, the images come accompanied by captions and hashtags underscoring the projected perfection of it all.
And yet that Turkish truck photo, despite its sparse plainness and lack of aesthetic appeal, does so much more for me personally than contemporary travel shots that are almost monotonous in their staged vibrancy. For one thing, it takes me back to a time when you could just see and do things without obsessing over how to properly curate the moment for diffusion on social media. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
In November of last year, Jesús, a 33-year-old man from the Venezuelan state of Falcón, spent 10 days traversing the Darién Gap – the treacherous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama – with his wife and two-year-old son. They were but three of the nearly 250,000 people who survived the crossing in 2022, most of them hoping to eventually reach the United States several thousand kilometres to the north.
I spoke with Jesús recently in the town of Metetí in Panama’s Darién province, where he is washing cars in an attempt to scrape together funds for his family’s onward journey. He recounted to me how, at one point in the jungle, he had been tumbling down a near-vertical hill of mud and had frantically grabbed what he thought was a tree root – but which turned out to be a hand belonging to a human corpse. He had been disconcerted at first, he said, but had then thought to himself: “That hand saved my life.”
The same cannot be said for US President Joe Biden, who, despite continuously promising to lend a helping hand to persons seeking refuge, is currently working to dismantle the very concept of asylum – in contravention of both international and domestic law. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.
The most important economic news of 2022 was neither the war in Ukraine, with the energy price hikes that came with it, nor high inflation. The key event of 2022 was the intensification of the battle for control of the global semiconductor industry. This dispute experienced its most critical moment on October 7—although this was not the only significant event of the year—when the U.S. Department of Commerce announced new regulations to restrict China’s access to the most advanced processors and supercomputers, as well as the equipment and software needed for the manufacture of the latest generation of semiconductors.
These regulations, a really radical shift in U.S. trade policy, above all show the strategic importance of semiconductors. But they also reveal a now undeniable rupture between the two great world economic powers. Moreover, they show how the future of the world economy is being shaped.
Let us start by identifying the issue. By semiconductor industry we mean the entire chain of design, manufacture, and installation of integrated circuits, called chips or microchips. These microchips are the basis for countless products such as the processors in computers and cell phones, the microcontrollers in cars, the television remote control, and many digital storage devices. It is almost impossible to think of the economy in 2023 without microchips. This article is written on a computer brimming with microchips, posted on the internet thanks to microchips, and read on a device (another computer, a tablet, a cell phone) crammed with, you guessed it, microchips. Even if you are reading this on paper, the printer you used is powered by them.
Semiconductors reveal a now undeniable rupture between the two great world economic powers. Moreover, they show how the future of the world economy is being shaped.
But it is not just consumer goods that live on microchips: much of contemporary research, from biology to physics, depends crucially on the semiconductor industry. In my academic work, I am engaged in field called computational economics, which uses fairly advanced integrated circuits to measure the economic impacts of climate change.
In fact, doing without oil would be much simpler than doing without microchips. One can drive an electric car recharged with solar panels or nuclear energy, fly in airplanes that use biofuels and replace many of the products of the petrochemical industry with biotechnological alternatives. The problem with electric cars (or hydrogen cars, if one is concerned about the mineral limitations of batteries), biofuels or organic plastics is their cost, directly or indirectly (creating the necessary infrastructure, for example, for green hydrogen). But if it is feasible to reduce the oil consumption of a modern society by 95 percent, it is simply too expensive, and that is why it is so difficult to move toward the needed decarbonization of our economies. However, getting rid of microchips is not possible without giving up what we consider “modern life” (in fact, even today’s production of oil and its products depends on chips and microchips from top to bottom). To go back to vacuum tubes is to go back to the 1950s.
But it is no longer just that our economies depend on microchips: state military power is a direct function of them. Since the Vietnam War, the United States has committed to using microchips to multiply its military force. The success, a thousand times repeated, of the HIMARs in Ukraine is an unequivocal consequence of electronics: from the design of missiles to their in-flight control, or the gathering of intelligence to select targets. In comparison, Russia’s poor military performance has much to do with its technological backwardness. Were it not for its nuclear weapons, Russia would be a third-tier power today and would have lost the war in Ukraine months ago, probably after the intervention of NATO area forces.
The Rise of Semiconductors
The semiconductor industry was one of the earliest and most radical examples of globalization since the pioneering Fairchild Semiconductor opened its Hong Kong plant in 1963. Look at your cell phone. The chances are the basic technology has been developed in the United States, the architecture of the processors that run it is designed in the United Kingdom, the photolithography machines that make it possible to manufacture these processors were built in the Netherlands, the processor has been produced in South Korea, and the final assembly of the cell phone was carried out in China.
For many decades, this international division of labor benefited everyone. Without the low labor costs of East Asia, the first generations of chips would never have been cheap enough for mass adoption, which helped generate the enormous economies of scale that transformed the industry. At the same time, the semiconductor industry helped these East Asian economies begin their growth process. Without the specialization of different nations, we would never have been able to coordinate the myriad talents needed to build an advanced processor, perhaps the most sophisticated creation of mankind, which needed participation of more than seventy countries and more than one thousand different manufacturing processes.
The story of the extraordinary success began in the mid-1960s but culminated more or less in the spring of 2016. Two related forces converged in that spring. The first force followed from the organization of semiconductors’ exponential complexity. Gordon Moore, one of Intel’s co-founders, predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year. (He later reduced this prediction to every two years.) The exponential growth has been spectacular. One way to think about “Moore’s Law” is that microchips have advanced as much between February 2021 and today, February 2023, as they have from their invention in 1958 to February 2021. To put the point in a more obvious way: the cell phone in anyone’s pocket has vastly more capacity than the world-class supercomputer on which I ran part of my PhD thesis results in the fall of 2000.
Without the specialization of different nations, we would never have been able to coordinate the myriad talents needed to build an advanced processor, perhaps the most sophisticated creation of mankind.
Leaders in Microchip Production
Moore’s Law assumes that, at present, the latest generation of microchips have some 80 billion transistors, which are devilishly complex and incredibly expensive to develop and manufacture. The combination of complexity and cost has led to a dramatic reduction of companies in the sector: there is neither market nor capital for more. Making semiconductors of 3 nanometers or less, the industrial frontier in February 2023, is only within the reach of three companies worldwide: TSMC of Taiwan (the largest “foundry” in the world, which manufactures, for example, the processors of the Apple and AMD), Samsung of South Korea, and Intel of the United States.
But even this short list has a “catch.” Only TSMC knows how to produce 7 nanometer or smaller semiconductors on a massive scale. Samsung can produce them, but on a smaller scale than TSMC. For example, the rumors in the industry are that NVIDIA had problems with its graphics processing units (we will come back to them in a few paragraphs) because Samsung could not produce enough circuits, even in the less complex 8 nanometer process. The situation reached such a point that the president of South Korea released from prison Lee Jae-yong, the de facto head of Samsung, at the end of August 2022, to bring order to his company’s semiconductor manufacturing (which seems to have worked well).
Intel is suffering innumerable delays with its latest processors. There is a non-trivial possibility that Intel will fall off the list when the new generation of GAAFET transistors arrives (from all directions)—and which Samsung already employs in part as of June 2022. Intel has announced a 2-nanometer GAAFET for 2024, but will it be able to produce it in quantity and on time? The latest news is not very optimistic about it, and the delay in the arrival of Meteor Lake 14th generation, or even its possible cancellation, is very worrying for the prospects of American business.
In short and to skip all the technicalities: the most advanced, and in a sense the most vital product in the world economy, is only produced without problems or delays and on a sufficient scale in Taiwan. And the second best alternative, Samsung products, are produced in South Korea.
In theory, this would not pose a major problem. There is another basic element in the manufacture of advanced microchips: photolithography machines that “print” the circuit pattern on a silicon wafer. The most modern machines, which employ a technology called extreme ultraviolet lithography, have been developed to produce the circuit pattern on a silicon wafer (here is a simple explanation of how to generate this light). Only one company in the world, the Dutch ASML, produces them, largely because they have the best laser technology since they bought California-based Cymer. ASML has fantastic profits, and the existence of a competitor would mean lower prices for integrated circuits. But economists think that the welfare costs of such a worldwide monopoly are likely to be very low because of the existence of potential competitors constantly “chasing” the Dutch company. That ASML dominates this market does not take a second’s sleep away from us. That TSMC dominates the market for more advanced microchips does.
Geopolitical Tensions
The key difference between ASML and TSMC is, obviously, where each is located. ASML is located in the Netherlands, a century-old democracy in one of the most stable areas of the planet and with a centuries-long tradition of being reliable trading partners (Dutch pirates disappeared long ago and only exist today in movies). Except for Switzerland, it is difficult to think of a country with less geostrategic risks than the Netherlands. Taiwan is also a democracy, at the moment very vigorous, but it is at the center of the most fundamental geopolitical rift of our times: the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to “reunify” the island with mainland China (the risk of devastating earthquakes and tsunamis in Taiwan is not trivial either, but we shall leave that for another day). And, as was said before, the second best alternative, Samsung’s products, are manufactured on the Korean peninsula, which is no temple of tranquility either, considering its northern neighbor.
The second force putting the brakes on the international division of labor in the semiconductor industry was China’s policy shift with the coming to power of Xi Jinping in 2012. Xi, whose worldview is very different from that of his immediate predecessors, was concerned about two things. The first is that the international division of labor in the semiconductor industry did not leave China in a very favorable situation. According to a recent study, the United States produces 39 percent of the world’s value in this industry, South Korea 16 percent, Japan 14 percent, Taiwan 12 percent, Europe 11 percent (thanks mainly to the two companies already mentioned: ARM in the United Kingdom and ASML in the Netherlands) and China 6 percent. The potential gains for China, perhaps the world’s leading consumer of integrated circuits (exact figures are hard to come by, given that many of these circuits are used in products that are then re-exported and re-imported numerous times), for making progress in this industry are tremendous. Furthermore, China appears to be losing ground in this field, with its company SMICs. Given China’s existing human capital base, with excellent polytechnic universities, the country has the capacity to leap from 10 nanometer processes to 7 nanometer processes. And with thousands of PhDs from the best technology programs in the United States, it is logical and normal to aspire to play at the top of the league.
Without a leading semiconductor industry of its own, China will not have the military capability to challenge the United States for world military leadership and, for example, be able to “reconquer” Taiwan.
The second observation, much less benign than the first, is that, without a leading semiconductor industry of its own, China will not have the military capability to challenge the United States for world military leadership and, for example, be able to “reconquer” Taiwan. Returning to a previous point: the war in Ukraine makes it clear that thousands of outdated battle tanks are useless.
Similarly, without the best in-house processors it is difficult to exploit all the advantages promised by artificial intelligence, including its military applications such as programming advanced drones. As the great Alan Kay once said, people who are really serious about their software should make their own hardware. China has great deep learning researchers, but it is far behind in the graphics processing units, necessary to train deep learning models, a market clearly dominated by NVIDIA. Contrary to what is often claimed, at the end of the day China lags far behind the United States in artificial intelligence, and its brutal “surveillance state” requires a huge number of workers performing manual supervisory tasks.
To close this military technology gap, China began a policy of “civil-military fusion” at the end of the 1990s. But it was Xi who made this policy a top priority of his government, in terms of both funding and resources (legal and illegal) devoted to it. This has meant that we find ourselves in a situation very different from previous disputes in the semiconductor industry.
Japan in the 1980s, for example, employed very aggressive techniques to gain market share in this industry. Some techniques were legal and ethical (investing large amounts in research and development), others legal but unethical (“stealing” engineers from U.S. companies to employ them in positions that did not violate the letter of non-disclosure agreements with their former employers, but did violate the spirit). And some were neither legal nor ethical (illegitimate acquisition of intellectual property through bribes). But, despite some nationalistic rumblings in Japan, the United States did not consider such behaviors to cross any red lines. Japan was (and is) a staunch U.S. ally; American companies also often bent the rules, and the benefits of the trade relationship for both sides were so high that it was not worth disrupting that for such little matters. At best, we could have readjustments at the margin, such as disputes over Japan’s possible dumping. Beyond having to suffer through a bad movie, none of this had major consequences.
We now find ourselves with a dictatorship, China, eager to achieve global geopolitical leadership by using any means at its disposal. During the spring of 2016, the United States concluded that suddenly the semiconductor industry was its strategic priority. Energy is already much less relevant from Washington’s perspective: remember that the United States is already a net energy exporter and that it could live, if it wanted to, without importing a drop of oil from the rest of the world. The battle is now semiconductors.
How this semiconductor battle began in 2016 and how it has escalated to the new regulations on October 7, 2022, will be left for my second article, as a fascinating story that blends my major personal interests—economics, technology, and politics—and which merits a leisurely telling.
This article is adapted from a version originally published in February 2023 at El Confidencial, a leading Spanish digital newspaper. We are grateful to Professor Jesús Fernández-Villaverde for his permission to publish it in English here, and to Thomas Howes for his translation.
Nature, Published online: 01 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05657-2
In optimally doped Nd0.8Sr0.2NiO2H epitaxial film, combined state-of-the-art experimental and theoretical approaches show abundant hydrogen with zero resistivity, and its critical role in superconductivity in epitaxial infinite-layer nickelates.
FreshRSS 