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Comment by galieos_ghost | Hacker News Reader

US was built on taking the best and brightest from other countries and giving them an environment to thrive, it benefited the individual and the country as well. I would love for you to become a citizen but for some reason Democrats have chosen to punish talented people who follow the law in favor of uneducated criminals.

The US will continue losing ground if we continue with current immigration policies

The biggest irony is that Silicon Valley companies support this. Imagine Google simply hiring anyone who walked onto Googleplex and removed all hiring standards for engineering positions, it would be suicidal. That's the equivalent to our current immigration strategy.

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I agree with this. While most people blame Republicans, it's Democrats who have been the biggest enemies of High Skilled Immigrants.

There were many situations in the past 8 years, where laws could be passed to benefit High skilled immigrants. However Democrats always said that either you have Comprehensive Immigration Reform or nothing.

I worked with someone senior from FWD.us. Apparently it was created to make sure that there is unlimited H1 but no Green Cards (especially for Indians who are most impacted by this and are a decent part of workforce at FB, Google, MS etc). Apparently Democrats promised that they if they move their cause to support illegal immigration, Democrats would never let the Green Card situation get fixed for high skilled immigration. Due to this FWD.us completely shifted focus from high skilled immigration to illegals.

Tech companies don't want H1B to become citizens because then they would have no leverage to drive down wages for software engineers. They want indentured servants, not citizens.

Agreed! People who think Companies wont go this far, need to look no further than the wage suppression agreement between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

> There were many situations in the past 8 years, where laws could be passed to benefit High skilled immigrants. However Democrats always said that either you have Comprehensive Immigration Reform or nothing.

Am I right to say your argument boils down to the Democrats tent being too big for your liking, and you would prefer them to have catered to High Skilled Immigrants? Unfortunately for you, the Democratic party has been a "big tent" party since FDR - that's their political schtik. I think you should have expected more from the party that supports "job creators" like you (or maybe not quite like you).

I hate to get sucked into this sort of political bickering here, but I feel like you're being a bit disingenuous. Yes, democrats during the Obama years did hold out for comprehensive reform, but to their credit it looked like they were only a few votes short for several years so their strategy made some sense. Additionally, it was the strategy of the Republicans in the House and Senate at the time to float small one off reform bills on various topics in order to peel votes off of broader initiatives and then scrap the smaller bills once the broad reform was killed.

You do have some Republicans who have some interesting things to say on immigration like Justin Amosh, but he's an exception. The nativists in the Republican party have been increasing in power an influence since 2010, and they want less overall immigration even among high skilled immigrants, it's literally part of their platform.

I would personally be in favor of scrapping the current system totally and setting a single cap per year. I would also give special consideration to refugees and skilled/in demand workers. I think increasing the number of temporary work visas is probably good as well. Now we have a cap per country, which is ridiculous.

When my ancestors came here in the late 19th and early 20th century, they were dirt-poor peasants in central and eastern Europe. I know at least one of my ancestors was a draft-dodger, too; he fled Russia because the tsar tried to have him conscripted to fight in the Russo-Japanese War.

The idea that the US always only accepted highly-skilled immigrants until very recently is false.

Till recently, best and the brightest meant physically fit and having a gumption and desire to achieve something better.

So US did get the best and brightest till recently!

In today's connected world and population explosion, there is a higher class of highly-skilled immigrants which can't stay in US, due to quotas based on country of birth. Because of this, best and brightest from India aren't moving to US anymore!

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