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Comment by curiousllama | Hacker News Reader

This is just another step in a broad-based program to make sure as few highly qualified people as possible can come to learn and work in the US.

(1) F1 visas have been effectively banned in much of the world since COVID started - the required interviews could only be done in now-closed centers. (2) H1B, L1, H4, and J1 visas have been suspended until the end of the year, leaving OPT transfers, H1B lottery winners (already a 1 in 3 shot), H1B transfers, and others in the lurch. (3) RFEs (a first step to visa denials) have been on a steep rise.

As a result, not only are we kicking people out, but international applications to US schools have absolutely collapsed; fewer people are even trying. The US is actively abandoning its goal of being the land of opportunity, and it makes me sad.

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It's another measurable, negative impact of the America First philosophy [1].

40% of the Fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrant families [2][3], so the U.S. is really shooting itself in the foot (again).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_(policy)

[2] F500 2010: http://research.newamericaneconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/20... (pdf)

[3] F500 2017: https://startupsusa.org/fortune500/

America first is a great policy. Our people need jobs and our policies should reflect that.

Immigrants create economic growth though. They come here, spend money, start businesses, and generate more demand for the things that create jobs.

In fact, preventing immigration reduces jobs. Companies will happily offshore any position they can.

Jobs don't just exist in a vacuum. They're the result of a relatively complex economy, but growth generally creates jobs. So we should grow.

It's a false dichotomy rooted in isolationism and justified by xenophobia. It takes care of Americans in name only.

Our policies should reflect that our people also includes immigrants and that we are strongest when the definition of american is == "the best and the brightest from around the world".

I don't think the America First folks realize how damaging these trump policies are to america.

The brain drain effect is almost always linked to poor economic performance. And the rules are so ham fisted now. Bipartisan H1B reform goes nowhere (prioritize US masters degrees, block H1B dependent employers from more H1Bs etc). Stupid stuff is everywhere.

Immigrants bringing in revenue (plenty) support US jobs in the US.

It's going to be a rude shock to the less skilled american worker to find a lot of jobs going remote overseas (Canada even) and their middle management / entry level office jobs vanishing.

This historic effect here, where another country educates someone, and then they come to the US, is INSANELY profitable for the US. Seriously, in a ruthless way folks who are not successful in school, have health issues, have criminal backgrounds, are disabled etc don't come in on these visas.

Instead its ambitious folks ANOTHER COUNTRY has invested a lot into coming to the US. How does that hurt the US?

This has always been a huge advantage the US has had. Crazy to see the US throwing it away.

Currently people with a Computer Science degree have ~95% employment during the worst economic downturn of my lifetime. I don't need goverment protection for my job. In order to be more competitive my company needs more workers with Computer Science degrees. Reducing the supply of computer science degree holders actually hurts my long term career prospects by reducing the international competitiveness of the type of business that would hire me.

No kidding, the US is gobbling up the worlds wealth through tech. The stupidity of throwing this away is monumental.

Your statement proves why you need immigrants to do high-skilled work.

This 40% stat gets pushed all the time with no context. The way it sounds is that super immigrants are starting these companies. But the way the study is, a 5 person founding team could have 1 person who was son/daughter of immigrant and then it is counted.

Lots of valuable brains are outside the country, but doesn't mean we should traffic in somewhat misleading statistics.

How is that misleading?

To be clear I have no skin in the game (not from the US), but if the GP's claims are true, then I was misled because I did think that the 40% that gets thrown around was founded only by immigrants.

Does it change my view on immigration? Of course not, but it does indicate that if immigration was stopped entirely then it is not true to say that that 40% slice of fortune 500 companies would simply never have been founded.

I mean if somebody told you "40% of fortune 500 companies are founded by first generation immigrants" that wasn't true, but I've never heard that, and I can't immediately find an article that says that.

The claim as stated here, "40% of the Fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrant families", is very straightforward.

BS. What is the image that comes to mind with: "40% of the Fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrant families" Sounds like they were solely responsible for creating this company.

Now a more precise statement: 40% of Fortune 500 companies had at least one immigrant or American with at least 1 immigrant parent on found team. Changes the image in one's mind a lot. Why not actually be straightforward instead of misleading?

I guess it would be better to change "founded" to "founded or cofounded".

Your formulation is fine too, although immigrants are Americans, so I don't love that distinction. Regardless, these all conjure up the same idea for me. For the purposes of this discussion, I don't even see much difference between founder and cofounder. Typically if someone is called a cofounder then the business probably wouldn't exist without them.

To settle the argument, why don't we agree to stick with this sentence from the original study: "43 percent of these companies were founded or co-founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant."

Well... 40% of the Fortune 500 had at least one founder that was from an immigrant family. I think that's the precise statement, but I might misunderstand.

That is not the same as saying that 40% of the founders of Fortune 500 companies were immigrants (which I believe is bruceb's point).

To your point: Let's say there were 5 founders. Let's say one was an immigrant. Would the company still have been founded by the other 4, if the immigrant were not there? That's unknown, but one would expect that at least some of the time the answer is "no". Or if it were founded, would it have grown as large as it did? Again, unknown, but in at least some cases the answer is probably "no".

To argue otherwise is to say that founders are replaceable parts - that they have nothing unique to add. That seems... questionable.

I think you are building a straw man from my comment instead of addressing the actual claim, my point is absolutely not about questioning whether the co-founders were relevant to the companies success.

My comment should be read as: I have seen the 40% figure given very often on HN and I did interpret it as 40% of Fortune 500 companies being founded only by first-generation immigrants.

To me someone who was born in a country and has citizenship in that particular country is not an immigrant.

If that was a strawman, it was unintentional.

But, to your actual point (I hope): I'm inclined to agree with your definition of immigrants. And yet, if we didn't accept the parents, we wouldn't have the children either.

The problem with that argument is, where do you draw the line? One generation? Two? A few decades? A few centuries? If you follow that argument too far, only businesses founded by Native Americans weren't founded by families of immigrants.

I think that categorizing people as immigrants, (first generation) children of immigrants, and non-immigrants makes sense for this discussion. And if "founded by families of immigrants" means first-generation children, that's still to some degree an argument that we want immigrants because of the effect they have on the economy. Not as direct an argument as if they were founded by immigrants, but still something of an argument.

I don’t agree with the overall point but there is an implication in the use of the stat that the business would not have started if not for that 1 out of 5 founder.

Alternatively, that role would have been filled By someone else.

>Alternatively, that role would have been filled By someone else.

If your hypothesis were true, then the rate of Fortune 500 companies being founded by immigrant families (40%) would be representative of the % of immigrant families in the U.S. population (24%), which it's not.

No, The ops point is if you include cofounding, the percentage should be higher than the population rate.

Made up numbers follow. If the average number of Cofounders was 4, at 25% population rate the number would be around 66% immigrant founded by that stat.

I don't understand what you mean. How would the role be filled? They invented the role, that's the point of founding something. They didn't apply to a job posting for the position of "founder" that somebody else could have applied to.

Say you have a CTO, Salesman and CEO founding and one is an immigrant, it is possible the other two would have filled that role with someone else.

Anything is possible, but the term "cofounder" is not usually thrown around lightly. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any cofounder willing to say they could have started their business without one or more of their fellow cofounders.

I think the reason you're getting down-modded is that the accepted way to challenge this kind of baseless statistic is "do you have a source for your 40% number?". Thanks for calling out this 40% number, I had just glanced over it and accepted it until you challenged it.

It really should be called "America Alone."

A real America-first policy would encourage and fight for high skill immigration, since that builds the economy of the US and depletes talent from other countries.

A players hire A players, B players hire C players.

If ability is normally distributed, and immigration is a filter for A players, their descendants will regress to the mean to become B players. B players want their C player American kids to have jobs over the A player non-American immigrant. America first.

Being an immigrant is not virtuous in and of itself. How many of those 40% 'immigrant families' immigrated here poor and climbed the economic ladder, and how many took stolen wealth from a feudal system in the old country and built a business?

Instead of investing in our domestic population with job training and scholarships, corporations are importing labor from overseas. Those people getting imported have degrees (sometimes of dubious quality) paid for by socialist states, often work for 'staffing agencies' to circumvent benefits and PTO of the real company, have very little job mobility, are most often paid below-market rates.

It's basic economics. More labor means cheaper labor.

Why are Blacks and Hispanics underrepresented in Software development [1]? If you compare the overall employment figures to the overall demographics of the country, they're almost identical, but way, way off for software development. It's because the most vulnerable people in the US don't have access to jobs and education, and corporations have no incentive to train entry level workers when they can just import them.

> so the U.S. is really shooting itself in the foot (again).

In what manner? The US doesn't need every genius walking on planet earth to reside in the US.

EDIT: reference

1: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

> More labor means cheaper labor.

The US population has grown from ~150 million in 1950 to ~350 million now.

Interesting. Describe real wage growth over that time period.

If you think the average wage in 1950 can get you more stuff than 2020, educate me then.

The only thing that got more expensive relatively speaking is housing. Which kind of make sense because land area don't tend to change.

Look around at your house and answer if you could get the same stuff (or even, poor replacement of the same stuff) if you're at the same percentile of income in 1950s.

There are more 'things' as a function of decreased costs of production, including, get this, importing lots of cheap goods from overseas.

1950 to 2020 looks good on paper, until you realize that the bulk of the wage growth happened prior to 1990. Since 1990, the S&P 500 has gone up approximately 10x. Meanwhile, wages have approximately doubled. That means in the last 30 years, the wealth gap has increased. If you consider only minorities, the picture is even worse.

It's almost like, US workers are losing their bargaining power for some reason. If you consider outsourcing, various trade agreements, and white collar immigration, those are all net-negative on US labor. Some demographics have been disproportionately impacted than others, just as predicted.

>More labor means cheaper labor.

This is the lump of labour fallacy[0], and is erroneously used to argue against immigration.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Weren't these visas supposed to be for bringing talented individuals with expertise deemed to be missing in the US? Was the visa system ever 'just' for bringing 'highly qualified' individuals? If America wants highly qualified individuals, it seems to me that 'nurturing' that talent is more important.

Bringing in uniquely talented individuals who can distribute expert knowledge accomplishes that.

Bringing an IT worker who does a good JAVA/.Net programming does not accomplish that... right?

Agreed

Bringing in raw talent and nurturing them here has been successful for USA. That is the student visa route.. I think you are referring to H1B?

Right, but the visas are not being exclusively used for IT workers. Instead of weeding out abuse all current policies seem to be to just blindly make immigration harder. Making it harder for all specialized fields to hire the folks they need doesn't help anyone. The administration is just pandering to it's anti immigrant base instead of solving hard problems.

Yeah, this whole idea seems a little misunderstood.

Here's some of the high-level effects of bringing international talent of all sorts to the US of year:

1) more talent in the US

2) less talent in other nations

3) the US can ignore pre-university education and opportunity problems

1 and 2 are great for the US government and the top of the US economy, but bad for pretty much everybody else.

3 is pretty awful for a huge number of actual US citizens. Especially given the current state of our nation, this seems like a problem.

I don't believe in "talent". It's all about nurture. If you need more talented people in huge fields for generations, yet half of your nation doesn't have college degrees, the problem is that you are not investing in your people successfully. If we invested more in education and resources for kids, parents, and families from before conception through early childhood and education, we would not have a shortage for fields like... computer science and engineering. These aren't fields that just popped up, they've been a big deal for a century.

This. This is exactly what I was thinking as I was reading through these threads. Logged in just to upvote, but might as well say: "Thanks for being out there my thought-doppelganger!"

Minor nit: I believe H1B transfers for people already in the country are still being processed. But your broader point of the US government actively preventing global talent from entering the country stands. Very sad indeed.

Not sad. Great!

What's great about that?

> The US is actively abandoning its goal of being the land of opportunity, and it makes me sad.

Yes - this is active, but not irrational, because this is a reversion to mercantilism of the earlier centuries (it is not a conservative position, but a regressive one).

The only people welcome to this country are "growing things in the ground".

Because if the only thing that you consider to be productive is farming (as in production == farming), then the whole social requirements of education, research or specialization is irrelevant. And in fact, those people are a drain on the food security and profitability of the extractive industry of farming.

Maybe because it is fresh, I was struck by a bit of the lyrics from Hamilton as being a direct reference to this thought that the rest of America is just "moving money around" in the service industries (even the industry, where every stage is just making something from somebody else's raw material, till you get to the Appalachian coal mines).

  Don't tax the South 'cause we got it made in the shade /

  In Virginia, we plant seeds in the ground /

  We create, you just wanna move our money around /

  This financial plan is an outrageous demand

Vote.

Unfortunately, Democrats don't have a great track record of passing pro skilled immigration bills either. In 2009-2010, when Democrats controlled the house and the senate as well as the presidency, they didn't bring in a single major immigration reform bill [1]. The DREAM act for childhood arrivals didn't pass the senate, and DACA was later passed through executive order in 2012. And right now some Democrats continue to oppose skilled immigration claiming that it is "racist" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress#M...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/22/trump-wan...

The immigration debate looked very different ten years ago. I’m not sure we should expect the same policies.

> (1) F1 visas have been effectively banned in much of the world since COVID started - the required interviews could only be done in now-closed centers.

Wouldn't lock-downs have resulted in the consulates being required to close in much of the world?

And how much reciprocity is there? Are Americans even allowed to travel to most of the world today? There are stories about schools in places like UK having to charter planes to bring students since it's impossible to get there otherwise. Making this all into a narrative about xenophobic americans seems near-sighted.

How much of this is due to existing Trump administration policies, and how much due to COVID?

But don't worry though, lots of jobs and prosperity in the coal industry. /s

The US allows over 1 million immigrants per year. Maybe less the past year, but still extremely high on an immigrant per capita basis.

H1B was being abused and needed to be reigned in.

There are still plenty of people coming into the country through various means, the US is still extremely generous with immigration.

There are plenty of qualified citizens here and in the zero sum game that is hiring national immigration policy should put their needs first before anyone else's.

Agreed

H1B abuse doesn't exist. It's made up. You multiply the quota by 100x and it wouldn't exist as a concept, same as J1 nanny visas being abused doesn't exist.

It does exist, but would be easy to fix.

The fix is the problem.

Even if you are anti-immigration, your biggest issue should be tourist visas which is how illegal immigrants stay in the US, and those are unlimited and in the millions. H1B quotas are stupid by design.

Could you point out those various means to me? Forgive me if that sounds rhetorical, but I'm serious - it would be life changing for some close friends. I only ask because as far as I'm aware, the only available option right now is marriage.

> There are plenty of qualified citizens here and in the zero sum game that is hiring national immigration policy should put their needs first before anyone else's.

This exact sort of anti-competitive nationalism has been tried before, and over and over again it has been abandoned. It's a failed policy that gives other countries a competitive advantage over your own.

It's better to learn from others' mistakes than to repeat them yourself.

>the US is still extremely generous with immigration.

Everything I read about it convinces me it's a byzantine and capricious process, and largely down to chance.

My process of gaining permanent residence in the Netherlands is a cakewalk by comparison. University MSc, then free access to the job market for a year, then after some years of employment and passing a relatively simple integration exam, I have long-term European residence. At no point was this up to the arbitrary whims of some immigration officer or a far-fetched lottery chance.

To me the idea that immigration is zero sum is repugnant and wrong.

There are hundreds of millions of people who want to come into the US each year. It's inevitably going to be a difficult process.

Probably wasn’t as expensive either. My buddy had to spend roughly $6k to become a citizen. Absolutely ludicrous.

It's important to realize that most of immigration (i.e., green cards) is family based (with marriage being first) and not employment based.

And yet despite bi-partisan legislation to reform H1B we get this stupidity.

It's going to be good to vote this cycle.

> H1B was being abused and needed to be reigned in.

Nothing has been reigned in. H1B quota got full early on this year and H1bs were allotted through a lottery of qualified candidates. Transfers are still being allowed. If your argument is that H1B gets abused then right way is to pass a reasonable bill and not blanket ban everything.

Yet again, F1 visa already prohibit students a 100% online school from entering the country. So your impression of immigration being "reigned in" is pretty misguided.

> the US is still extremely generous with immigration.

US is the WORST country on earth for immigration. I came to US >10 years ago, still NOWHERE near getting a Green Card. Will probably won't get well into my 30s or 40s. It's practically impossible to get it in the next 5 years.

The same time I started undergrad in US, my friend started undergrad in Germany. He was already a German citizen by the time we were working. I was still on F visa. This was like half a decade ago.

My biggest regret EVER was doing this in the US. If I got a PhD in Europe instead of US, I wouldn't be a person who doesn't have a country.

I understand that American people don't want immigrants. But let's not pretend immigration into US is easy. I've been trying my entire life to live here without getting kicked out and it's pure luck. One mistake and you need to wrap your entire life, leave loved ones and go back home. Again, I'm NOT saying I'm entitled to living in the US, I'm saying this is an extremely long, and complex process.

+1 to what you said. 18 years for me and no permanent residency in sight. I'd have been a citizen a few times over in any other country.

That's horrible. I have several friends from different origin countries (including USA) who have received Swiss citizenships (which the American right wing holds up as some sort of uber-restrictive standard) in half that time.

The time to naturalize in Switzerland is now 10 years (it used to be a bit longer) unless married to a Swiss citizen, in which case it's shorter. Include that plus the processing time and assuming your friends were in one of the right residence status categories during their entire time in Switzerland, it would have taken them at least 11 years or so.

Could the waiting be attributed to your country of citizenship? I know there's a long wait for citizens of a few countries because there are per-country limits on green cards.

Nope, I'm not from China or India (so I'm in the global pool). If you're from India, it's impossible to get citizenship this way (the waitlist is too long), you need to marry a US citizen if you want citizenship.

On what planet is the US’s immigration policy “extremely generous”? Have you experienced it? The costs and hoops and sheer years it takes?

Or, maybe American’s have grown tired of educating state sponsored (China) students whose sponsors quite literally seek to exfiltrate knowledge from U.S. academia and industry. Do you think I as an American would be welcome to attend a Chinese university 100% remotely? Do you think China would allow any American to attend a program in China that could help the U.S. build a competitive or defensive advantage?

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