Billionaire (Sergey Brin) Aids Charity That Aided Him
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Okay, this will probably sound cheesy beyond belief, but: this is the American Dream, in purest form. In all the angry arguments about immigration we lose sight of the fact that the USA has always been a nation of immigrants; many of us are only a handful of generations removed from people who came to this land, often with little to their name, to build a new life.
All the practical issues aside, I've always felt that anyone who wants to come to this country to live and work is already an American in spirit--far more so than the angry xenophobes who were merely born here.
. . .
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!There isn't an ethnic group in the U.S. that isn't an immigrant -- even our "natives" wandered across land bridges in search of something better.
This way companies won't get to drive down salaries by just importing a bunch of Indians to work for slave wages.
Call it Patriot Wage Freedom Act. Which would make it a form of discrimination to pay less than fair wage for employees based on their immigrant status. You make it illegal for companies to pay $10/hour for a C++ developer with 10 years experience in California and you can import as many programmers as you wish.
Possibly it makes economic sense to require them to be paid the same. But making the argument in terms of coercion is disingenuous.
Yes it makes economic sense to the company, but why should the American government help them at the expense of our own citizens? We have 10% unemployment, plenty of people willing to work, why should we subsidize your greed by giving you access to more slave labor?
If they're willing to work for $8/hour here, that means things are worse for them where they are. Who are you to cast people into poverty, death, and dismay so that your economy can maintain a slightly higher salary.
Earth is not a magical place with rainbows and unicorns, you want to come to this country? Make us want you. Get a PhD or a Masters and you are good to go. My parents won the green card...TWICE...in the same year. So the odds mustn't be that hard.
unskilled labor is just that, unskilled, I'm suggesting that having someone pay $200K for a college degree and then importing cheap labor because you don't want to pay the salary is bullshit
Do you think when millions of starving Irish refugees turned up in the 1840s it didn't depress wages for existing American workers at the time? Or the Poles, or the Germans, or the dozens of other nationalities?
Immigration is an economic force which moves labour from areas of high supply to areas of high demand. The result, considered globally, is greater prosperity for everybody.
The American economy is and always has been fuelled by cheap labour in the form of unskilled immigration -- forget $30k, the people who really get the economy moving are doing shit work for $8/hour.
Lower wages means goods are cheaper, which means you can buy stuff that's cheaper, and when we export it we make more money. Lower wages are GREAT for the economy -- even, in the long run, for those in the industries affected, because their savings are bigger (cheaper stuff) and worth more (lower inflation), and their standard of living is higher (more stuff).
And it's as true in high tech as it is in blue-collar industries.
Saying you don't think there should be programmers working for $30k is exactly like those idiot auto workers who formed unions which demanded that they all be paid $60k/year to do the same assembly work people in Asia are doing for $30k. As a result, they're now either out of work or YOU are paying their ridiculous $60k wage out of your tax money after the bailouts. Not exactly the American Way.
Even if you shipped over every single able and willing programmer in India and China to California tomorrow wages wouldn't drop to $10/hour. There are just not that many programmers in the world.
But because some Americans are terrified that rampant immigration will mean they earn $95k instead of $100k/year, every time they get they opportunity they vote to make it harder for hard-working, skilled immigrants to enter and stay in this country. In so doing, they save that $5k but never earn the $50k they would have earned as the stock market rose on the strength of all that immigration-fuelled growth. But because you can't see money you never earn, few people complain.
Do you know how many H-1B visas (the most common skilled tech worker visa) are granted every year? 65,000. That's 0.02% of the population. You could let in 10 times as many people every year and nobody would even notice.
America's anti-immigration policies are stupid and self-defeating on a purely economic analysis, before you even get into the issue of a nation of white immigrants suddenly deciding that immigration is bad because the new guys are all brown.
Yes they do shit work for $8 an hour...but does that mean that you need to turn high paying professions into "shit work" just because the companies want to save a buck? Programming should not be an $8/hour job, no matter what kind of language you are using. Hell have you even read some of the code written by these guys? Calling it garbage would be insulting to garbage.
Oh please, lower wages for skilled labor doesn't mean squat for a company's bottom line. When you are making billions, paying a few less million in wages won't change anything.
Wages have ALREADY dropped to $10 an hour. Go hit up craigslist, PLENTY of companies looking for software developers with 5 years experience, and offering $10 an hour. And the screwed up thing, is that they'll get it. Some programmer, who's been out of work for a year or two, because the market is crappy, will do the job because he has to put food on the table. That is if he is lucky, because he'll have to compete with 100 other people for the position.
This is America, we need to take care of our own first, before we decide to help the rest. When the times are good noone cares about immigrants, but when you see people being laid off left and right to be replaced by incompetent immigrants...then it's time to put the foot down.
If you think increasing the # of people won't change anything you are smoking crack.
Why are they stupid? Are we blocking all immigrants? No, we are letting in the 65K like you mentioned. That just means that we are getting the cream of the crop. Why do you want to lower the quality? You only lower the restrictions when you are in need of more people. That is not the case now.
Hey I'm an immigrant myself, first generation too, and as someone who went through the process, I want STRICTER control on immigration. We came during the time when America needed new talent. That's not the case now. We are over capacity. Sorry, the country is full...come back when we recover.
When times are good, fine let everyone in. But when people end up unemployed for 2-3 years at a time, letting more people to expand the # of unemployed is just plain stupid.
How will these immigrants stir up the economy? They don't come here with a job like H1B Visa guys, they come here penniless, with crappy English and no connections.
Yeah they'll stir up the economy alright, by adding more unemployed, desperate people willing to work for nothing, just to pay the bills.
I'm not for closing the door right after I get in, I'm for closing the door, because the times are tough and the country is fucked. Once the economy starts expanding again, sure open the door. But until then, when jobs are limited, the last thing we need is bring in more competition.
They increase unemployment rate because they come here to get jobs.
Why can't the same people be some of the 10% of unemployed in this country? Sure it reduces the unemployment rate, but only if it's the same 10% going for it, if you add an extra half a million unemployed workers, them taking jobs does nothing for unemployment
The same way newly born Americans do: they consume goods and services.
Individuals with good product ideas, a field of consumers, and cheap labor can produce large numbers of goods that can be exported as well as consumed in local economies.
This is much harder to do when dealing with labor that has an upward force applied to its wages, either by being artificially limited (as in current immigration policies) or by requiring a rare skill.
Economies aren't zero-sum games. I really don't get why more people don't understand this.
Imagine the simplest case of 2 people (Alice and Bob) and a single $100 bill. If Alice is kind hearted and gives Bob $100 every time she is able but Bob pays $100 for Alice's work (say, making a chair, painting a house, etc.) this isn't a functional economy. All of Alice's labor goes to benefit Bob, Alice would be better off abstaining from the "economy" and using her labor to benefit herself.
Now imagine that Alice gives Bob $100 for work that Bob's done, then Bob gives Alice $100 for work that Alice has done, etc, etc. Alice then ends up with the fruits of Bob's labor, and Bob ends up with the fruits of Alice's labor, if they have unique skills then this true economy could be mutually beneficial.
The trading of money is just a proxy for the bartering of goods and services, money is just paper. Doing work contributes positively to the economy, it's the fundamental building block of the economy (not spending money).
Since people notice the smaller number, they would presumably notice the much larger number. I know, I know: When you are on your knees worshiping political orthodoxy, not one fact is allowed near the temple.
Now that the UK economy has tanked the same Polish migrants are heading home or to other areas of the EU. Obviously, some have decided to stay in the UK. But a lot have gone to Poland to start a business in their home country because now their is demand and money available. If the immigration rules were restrictive than most would be reluctant to leave because you're either in or out.
Immigration should be a simple process; a bit of paperwork and a background check. Each state could make small additions like a health plan and unemployment insurance are bought by the worker or supplied by the company.
Do people think these are connected by happenstance?
"Give me your tired, your poor"
"The wretched refuse..."
America takes the refuse of the world, and rather than treating it as refuse we give everyone a chance. We put everyone to work and let everyone realize their potential, amortized over millions all those potentials, even the small ones, add up. And we let the outliers that the rest of the world cast away as refuse shine. Carnegie, Einstein, Fermi, so many more.
If he had not emigrated to the US in the 30s, John von Neumann may well have ended his life in the mid-40s in a Nazi oven instead of making key contributions to physics and computer science.
Let me state this in the clearest possible terms.
Prejudice is a losing strategy.
You can't predict with any certainty the degree to which someone will succeed or fail in their lives. The best you can do is give damned near everyone an equal chance to PROVE themselves. This is the American model. It is through this method that the many, many outliers tossed away as refuse by the rest of the (judgmental, prejudicial, biased) world come to America and realize their full potential. America is the land where a destitute immigrant or a college dropout can become the richest man in the world (Carnegie & Bill Gates respectively).
It's the same sort of "let the doers prove themselves" system that has evolved into the startup world of recent times.
It's a damned amazing thing and it's something I'm utterly proud of.
Please, all you short-sighted, small-minded, prejudiced people out there who don't realize how this works and want to close off America's borders and gut the goose that lays the golden eggs: DON'T FUCK IT UP!
For a bit of perspective, the Wikipedia list of countries by GDP shows his personal wealth is more than the GDP of the lowest one hundred countries. More than Nepal, Afghanistan, Jamaica, not far away from Iceland. More than Tuvalu's GDP for a thousand years.
The Manhattan Project cost about $22 Billion in today's dollars (says Wikipedia).
He is in an incredibly rare place where an individual has the economic power of a small country, a big company, a city council. That much cash channeled into one area could work wonders. World changing wonders.
How much would a "Manhattan Project" push for any one of the scientific holy grails cost? (Room Temperature Superconductivity, for instance).
It seems almost a waste to just give it to charity and ignore such a large and rare opportunity to do what almost no other person can afford and no company or government can justify.