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Comment by greiskul | Hacker News Reader

Can't answer for others, but I look at this law from the viewpoint of foreign workers, cause I am a foreigner worker. In Canada. Decided to absolutely never immigrate to the US due to the US blatant rise in xenophobia.

And the US has proven me correct over and over again in that assessment. Will watch with great pleasure the brain drain your country will face, and I honestly hope your economy will completely collapse.

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> I honestly hope your economy will completely collapse.

The U.S. passed restrictive immigration laws in 1921. The foreign born population dropped to under 5% by 1970 (compared to 15% today). The decade on either side of that was a golden age for Silicon Valley.

For the record, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Patrick and John Collison, and Jerry Yang are foreign-born. Probably more would not have been here if their parents had not been allowed to immigrate. Now that you mention it, I would trade a few of them away, but I doubt the market would like to erase their work.

The first three we would be better off without, don’t recognize the last three. Not sure you are really selling your point.

I don't have a particular love for any of them, but the point was they generated billions in value for the valley in what some consider a golden age.

Google at least, I think people would say there was a period of near-universally believing it was a good thing, and an immigrant was a co-founder.

It definitely shaped our society. And if you think it's for the worse, might that suggest college-educated Anglo-adapting immigrants are more dangerous to us than the ones right-wingers are telling us to focus on?

Sergey Brin recently said having to pay taxes on his 280 billion to the state took him in and where he built his business was akin to the horrors of boleshivsm that his family fled from.

That is your “good” immigrant. He is the right winger.

The original point was only that a Silicon Valley "golden age" can coexist with immigration. Admittedly it could be a better argument if it holistically made a recommendation, but at least as a starting point it tries to refute that idea.

It can but not under the current system. People are far less likely to support social safety nets in a high immigration society. There just isn’t the social cohesion and trust necessary.

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