It matters that U.S. sanction policies were overseen by a man who grew up watching his parents send money through Western Union to relatives in Nigeria.

That man, the deputy U.S. Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, was born in the Nigerian city of Ibadan. He understood how catastrophic it could be when a community gets cut off from its financial lifeline in the United States. He brought that knowledge to the table when he recommended measures that would mitigate the unintended consequences of sanctions on innocent people abroad.

That’s worth remembering today as Americans bid farewell to the most diverse administration in U.S. history — and as we watch a new administration that pledges to dismantle diversity initiatives take power.

Joe Biden took office promising to create an administration that looked like America, and he delivered. Half of his cabinet appointments are people of color, according to Inclusive America, a nonprofit organization that puts out a government diversity scorecard. His cabinet included the first Black defense secretary (Lloyd Austin), the first female Treasury secretary (Janet Yellen), the first Native American cabinet member (Deb Haaland, interior secretary) and the first Senate-confirmed openly gay cabinet member (Pete Buttigieg, transportation secretary).

Even more striking is the number of senior officials who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy? Arati Prabhakar, who was born in India. The acting labor secretary, Julie Su, is the child of a woman who arrived in the United States on a cargo ship from China because she couldn’t afford a passenger ticket. At a time of rising ethnonationalism around the world, the Biden administration modeled just the opposite.

Too often, critics have labeled this commitment to diversity as politically correct window dressing or a source of government bloat. But when diversity is done right, it can be a crucial strategy for bolstering American power. The United States attracts the world’s best and brightest because they can rise here and eventually help run the place. Newcomers to China, Russia and Iran can’t expect the same thing. That makes diversity in the ranks of the federal government a big comparative advantage.