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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

As an immigrant co-founder who has created 2 jobs and is hiring to create 2 more right now, I promise that some of us are creating new jobs, not stealing them. Exhibit A: http://awesm.jobscore.com/list

(I'm hoping the above job link does not count as spam in this context, but I will edit and remove it if so)

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And I greatly appreciate it, but you're an edge case at best.

I am not in any way an edge case. 50% of founders in Silicon Valley are immigrants:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/09/economic...

You got me there, but I still assert that the vast majority of immigrants aren't founders hiring Americans, and what's happening in Silicon Valley simply doesn't hold true many other places here in the US. In my part of the country, I'm actually much more frustrated with undocumented illegal immigrant labor than I am with student- or work-visa immigrant labor.

That's looking at it the wrong way. Look at the percentage of immigrants who are creating jobs, not the percentage of job-creaters who are immigrants. Or net jobs created by immigrants. Or something.

Percentage of immigrants who are job creators, versus percentage of native-born citizens who are job creators would be interesting. To be worth it to the economy, immigrants don't need to create more jobs than they take, they just have to be better at it than native-born people.

I'm also an immigrant founder (actually not really an immigrant because I want to go back to Spain eventually). I have not created any jobs yet but I can assure you I've invested WAY more money in this country than I took out of it.

My girlfriend also works here and it's going to take her years to get back the tens of thousands of hard-earned euros she invested in her Master's. I have many friends in that plane.

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