Why Silicon Valley Wouldn't Work Without Immigrants

Which argument against H1Bs are you referring to? Because Steve Bannon's, which may well be the most influential in government policy right now, was embedded against an argument that also specifically called out the overall proportion of immigrants in the US population as a problem. It is, quite directly, an anti-immigrant argument.

Explain. As I see it, none of these companies could hire enough in the US to exist here at all without H-1Bs. They would have to move operations somewhere else if they couldn't bring people here. I've never worked on a team at Google that was more than a third from the US.

Tech companies already have offices around the world since not everyone wants to or can move here. If there were fewer work visas, they would just hire less in the US and more abroad.

>H1Bs aren't allowed to start companies, so this point is moot

People who started the immigration process on H-1B do. They are one of the only ways to effectively come here. Getting a green card can take 8 years for someone from a large country.

Whatever the "arguments" may be for or against, the policies that fall out of those arguments have an impact on immigration and hiring practices.

-- So are you saying we should let H1bs start companies and not be reliant on the job?

-- "It isn't surprising that many companies are founded by immigrants or children of immigrants."

50% of the company is not immigrants. 50%! That number is mind blowing. That is much higher than the country as a whole.

-- "startups valued at more than 1 billion dollars? OK..."

?

-- "those dollars in the economy are concentrated in hands of the very wealthy"

You think immigration is to blame for income inequality?

-- " I have a hard time believing "

This is not an argument. You're just asserting that he is lying without any argument.

You're very obviously wrong. The employees of Tesla and its suppliers will extract the extreme majority of all financial value from the existence of Tesla. If Tesla survives for 20 years, that tally will be in the multiple hundreds of billions. Elon Musk will end up owning a single digit percentage of that value creation. The same is true about nearly all successful corporations. Of all the financial value created by Google over its existence, Larry & Sergey (and the early Google investors, most of whom liquidated not long after the IPO) will end up having owned a tiny sliver of it.

Uber's drivers will extract the extreme majority of all financial value created by Uber. Over a 20 year span, that number will dwarf what Kalanick and Uber's investors extract. Further, Uber riders will derive a similarly extreme financial value over what Kalanick does, through convenience / time saved etc.

Good luck naming a company that isn't true for.

I'd love to see the H-1B visa cap expanded, I'd just like it to be done alongside a move to let workers actually enter the labor market like citizens. The current "must pay market rates" setup is a bizarre attempt to duplicate market results under a command system, and we see all of the mis-labelling and other abuses we'd expect with that approach.

I did see that as of 2017 there's a brief window to find a new visa'd job after leaving an H-1B position, which is a nice start. But I'd really rather see the thing reformed via something like "he's a skilled labor visa, go for it". Even if employers were still forced to apply for visa slots it'd be progress to say "here are people with visas, here are companies with slots, coordinate however you'd like".

The solution to H1B abuse is to abolish the visa category entirely.

The solution to "there is insufficient domestic supply of high-skill labor, and making more foreign workers available for domestic work of this kind would, with appropriate controls, produce a public benefit", if that is really the case, is to design a system with appropriate controls that does that, which probably won't look much like the H-1B program. It'll start with an analysis of the real nature and extent of the shortage, and the nature of the opportunity for public benefit.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...

1998, under the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act[1]. $60,000 in 1998 would be about $89,000 today, after adjusting for inflation. Trump's initiative is around $40K above that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Competitiveness_and_W...

Lots of people, some of them quite publicly—including Steve Bannon, Trump's Chief Strategist in that latter group—do. Some because they are competition for jobs, some because of general xenophobia, some for other reasons.

Bannon has specifically criticized legal immigration generally, and the "progressive plutocrats of Silicon Valley" and the H1B program and the preponderance of Asians (calling out both South and East) in tech specifically. If you think he's only interested in curbing "less skilled" immigration, you're mistaken.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bannon-explained-his...

The bill just introduced to cut the number of green cards issued in half, eliminate the diversity lottery, and impose permanent cuts in the number of admitted refugees would be exhibit 1.

Respectfully: you have not been paying close attention.

Basically they're playing up one angle in the hopes it will cause sympathy in others who are not affected. Employers don't want to seem "exclusive" do they have to send out pro forma communications about their inclusiveness and vision of one world even when they are not affected or minimally affected by the bans.

They probably lose more money in the form of lost sales due to export restrictions to other places, but you don't see the dame dire warnings of a threat to viability.

I had started making plans to leave in late 2014. I convinced myself that if the administration does not do anything to fix green card backlogs by end of that calendar year, I should leave in 2015. Obama's State of the Union address gave new hopes, and I stayed back. The promises made then went through the red tape and USCIS finally published its ruling last November [1]. Unfortunately it did not contain any relief for skilled immigrants stuck in green card backlogs.

My current plan is to wait until end of this calendar year to see how things progress. My green card priority date is April 2012 and, as things stand now, I am still many years away from getting a green card. I will re-evaluate in December. If I don't see this administration making any concrete plans to fix things for the green card backlog, I will leave in 2018.

H.R.392: Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2017 [2] gives me hope. It currently has 66 co-sponsors [3] and will hopefully pass.

   H.R. 392, Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act replaces the current per-country caps 
   on immigration with a first-come first-served visa system without increasing the total number 
   of available visas. The current system of awarding no more than 7% of available employment-based 
   visas to one country is discriminatory. It ultimately imposes decades-long wait times for people 
   from some countries, creating a backlog of qualified workers. The bill makes no changes to the 
   current law limiting US employers to hire foreign workers except when there are no qualified, 
   willing, able, and available American citizens. 

[2] http://chaffetz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentI...

[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/392/...

The internet has an evil-genius ability to push all our buttons and drive us all crazy. There often isn't enough information to know for sure what anyone else means or intends, and imagination—drawn from our personal experience, i.e. data about us, not the other—fills in the gaps. This happens especially when strong feelings come up. At that point we start responding not to the real others, whom we have next to no data about, but to evil cartoon characters who vaguely resemble them. We end up feeling surrounded by our own demons.

The way out of this dynamic is for all of us to give one another the benefit of the doubt. It's a big risk, so we all need to be scrupulous about it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13598500 and marked it off-topic.

I think you know all that isn't true and I think the readers can see through those accusations and it ultimately devalues your input to the discussion.

(For the record I want an automatic green card for skilled immigrants and a higher bar for what counts as a skilled immigrant. I want a massive expansion of refugee immigration into the US. I want automatic green cards for unskilled immigration where they have created roots in the US)

But in general it is the rise of anti-immigration sentiment, and the instability with respect to immigration.

There's the case of green cards for Indians and the Chinese. Under the current system, Indians and Chinese workers who start the process of getting a green card today must wait at least 13 years to get it. The prospect of working under a temporary visa for the best years of your life, always under the shadow of a change in administration or policy that uproots you and sends you back to your place of birth is likely to deter a lot of people, and might tempt them to move to Europe or Canada instead.

This is a lose-lose situation because these people don't get to work at the cutting edge of tech, and also the companies that desperately need bright minds lose out on them because they sensibly decided not to risk the US's broken immigration system.

This wasn't always the case, by the way. It's a pretty recent development over the last few years. Since green cards are allotted by place of birth and are a fixed number for every country, it is far easier for a person from Afghanistan to become a permanent resident than for an Indian.