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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

This premise is a fantasy. The same exact article previously popped up about China. I'm getting the impression it's meant more to be propaganda to preemptively discourage bad policy by pushing the notion that America's tech golden egg could be swiped by competitors.

The most likely outcome is the H-1B program is modestly increased when it's revamped, to placate the silicon valley power base that does in fact still have extremely broad, extremely influential reach in DC (the tech industry is now by far the largest lobby group overall, surpassing telecom & defense).

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I think people are underestimating how radical the incoming unified Republican government will be. They are very ideological not pragmatic, and they will have almost unrestricted power.

I'd like to believe you, but 'the most likely' outcome has not consistently happened recently.

Regardless of lobbying, the incoming administration ran a campaign that was built on anti-immigrant sentiment. Their base wants that. They have to throw their base something. No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them.

This could totally happen, and it bothers me as a citizen because a lot of my co workers are on H1-Bs.

> No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them.

cough Thiel cough

No one other than Peter thiel. The USA is much more purple than you might imagine.

The solution to the H1B fiasco is to let individual companies straight up bid on the 100,000 visas, irreguardless of nationality or occupation and be done with it.

Then we could put the money from this into a scholarship fund to pay for US citizens only.

> No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them.

20% of Santa Clara County voted for Trump. 20% of funds raised in Santa Clara County went to Trump. That's a small fraction by two-party system standards, but it's not no one.

  20% of funds raised in Santa Clara County went to Trump

Can you provide your source for this? (Not being snarky -- I have trouble finding that level of detail in terms of residence vs. company HQ)

From memory. I'm wrong. 20% went to Republicans, not Trump: https://www.opensecrets.org/states/geog.php?cycle=2016&state...

Vote % is from the registrar of voters: http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/64404... (from https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Pages/Registrar-of-Voters.a...)

  20% went to Republicans

I think that source has issues. The percentages total up to 135% for Santa Clara County. I'm 112% sure that has an error.

For Santa Clara county

Total donations: $59,683,708 Democrat donations: $28,362,650 (47% of Total) Republican donations: $7,613,361 (13% of Total)

It is weird that the percentage column reports 75% and 20% instead of 47% and 13% respectively but that exactly accounts for the extra 35%.

> extremely influential reach in DC

Including the Washington Post, aka Jeff's Blog.

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