8 ms·

The tone of tech companies does not resonate with the electorate. The Bay Area basically says to America: We have foreigners here who founded some companies and

• jacquesm 10y ago
  It may not be the desired tone but essentially that's how America got populated in the first place, a place where foreigners with some disadvantage in their country of origin could get rich. And many did. Kicking the door behind you closed once you've got yours or because you're afraid new immigrants will take your job is hypocrisy of a terrible kind for a nation that was founded on immigration.
  • devmunchies 10y ago
    > that's how America got populated in the first place This isn't 1910. We are the top 5 in the world in population. We don't need as much immigration as we used to. Americans should benefit from the American system before foreigners, like, you know, how every other country works.
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      America never needed immigration, not since the first European landed there. Historically immigration has initially always been to the advantage of the immigrant, only later does the balance shift the other way and do subsequent generations contribute substantially to the bottom line. > Americans should benefit from the American system before foreigners, like, you know, how every other country works. First of all, that's not how every other country works, then besides that America is mostly empty space and Americans will benefit from the system before foreigners because they have been there longer, have more starting capital (which is the biggest lever you can have) and tend to know the rules better so they can be worked to their advantage.
      • mywittyname 10y ago
        Historically America absolutely needed immigration. Early America lacked a lot of skilled laborers. England was opposed to allowing skilled workers to emigrate to the US for fear of the US competing with England. The preferred the US to provide them with cheap agricultural goods in exchange for high-priced steel, tools, and weapons. It wasn't until the mid 1800s that the US began work on the first steel mill because they couldn't get the expertise necessary to build one. At the time, Britain produced about half of all steel consumed in the world, once the US finally imported the skills necessary to produce steel, Britain's share of the global plunged by half. I'm certain this story can be repeated for many more industries throughout history, from chemistry, rockets, medicine, and technology. So yes, America has always needed immigrants.
        • jacquesm 10y ago
          Early America was full of Native Americans and they didn't need those immigrants at all. The people that needed the skilled laborers were immigrants themselves. By the way, the very best way to stop immigration is to make other countries wealthy.
          • mywittyname 10y ago
            You're being intentionally obtuse. Sure, the Native Americans would have gotten along fine with bows and horses. But we are discussing the economy. The growth the US economy throughout its history was driven heavily by immigration.
            • jacquesm 10y ago
              No, I'm pointing out the hypocrisy in your statements. The Native Americans had an economy too. > The growth the US economy throughout its history was driven heavily by immigration. Yes, because of the increase in demand for goods by those immigrants who brought their money/gold/silver if they had it but very little in terms of goods, and if they didn't have anything they immediately went to work in order to make ends meet. Immigration is good for the economy, which is exactly the conclusion I want you to reach but from the increased demand point of view rather than from the myth that the majority of immigrants in the past were skilled labor (they were rather, on the whole immigrating because of a bleak outlook on their situation in their home countries due to religious persecution or outright poverty, the skilled craftsmen were making good money back where they lived and were much more free in their choices to emigrate or not and contributed only a very small number to the total stream of immigrants).
    • lineindc 10y ago
      > Americans should benefit from the American system before foreigners, like, you know, how every other country works. Found the fascist nazi bigot. /s
      • jacquesm 10y ago
        Found the insulting novelty account. Please do not do this. Thank you.
        • lineindc 10y ago
          It was sarcasm, as the /s indicates. If you didn't like the joke downvote and move on.
          • ghurtado 10y ago
            1. "/s" -> those two characters are not a "get out of jail free card" that allows you to behave without respect and decorum. 2. On HN, flagging a comment like yours is a much more appropriate response than downvote. Maybe once you've had enough of our comments removed you'll start to understand the etiquette around here, but there's easier ways to fit in.
            • lineindc 10y ago
              If the "created" field in your profile is of any significance, I've been here for much longer than you. Stop bossing around other people just to feel morally superior.
              • ghurtado 10y ago
                So you've already been banned once?
    • boomboomsubban 10y ago
      We were fourth in 1910, and moving to third seems more to do with the breakup of Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_in_1907 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...
    • maxerickson 10y ago
      Americans should benefit from the American system before foreigners, like, you know, how every other country works. There will be specific Americans who benefit less than specific immigrants, but the net effect of immigration has pretty much always been a benefit to the economy. Why should we put the interests of specific Americans ahead of the interests of Americans overall?
      • mc32 10y ago
        He's saying we should have a preference for existing Americans before we handicap foreigners. But with re Americans over other Americans, yes, it makes sense to handicap underprivileged Americans. Give them a leg up on education, training, tax breaks, etc. before we even begin to think of how we can benefit foreigners.
        • maxerickson 10y ago
          He's saying we should have a preference for existing Americans before we handicap foreigners. Yes, I'm saying that it doesn't accomplish the stated goal. Restrictive immigration policy is worse than a more welcoming policy when you consider the impact on all existing Americans. Immigration is the better policy for Americans, it's just that the benefit is spread out across more people than the downside, so it is easy to think otherwise. As far as retraining and such, we should seek to design such things so that they are highly available and are beneficial to the United States as a whole regardless of whether you train an immigrant or a first, second, third, or fourth (or fifth or sixth or seventh) generation American.
          • mc32 10y ago
            So not only are we wrong, but so is every other country on earth. How is it all countries, many of which would like to become relatively more competitive than America, seem to all be making the same mistake you allude to? W/re training. America is responsible for training our own, I don't think we should think we should off load that job to say Canada, and in the same way people's home countries should be responsible for their own citizens wellbeing and development. We cannot be responsible for nor absorb the deficiencies by other countries with respect to their own citizens, in effect subsidizing malgovernance.
    • mc32 10y ago
      In addition with looming automation, we simply cannot employ all the people who want to come here for a job, either skilled or unskilled. We have large swaths of underemployed Americans but it costs companies too much to recondition them, so they prefer new bodies over training the domestic workforce. This should be an opportunity for the likes of YC to double down on extending their know how to American women, American minorities and other underprivileged Americans, but instead they bemoan how a few foreigners are affected all the while ignoring how those same countries might treat not only foreigners, but their own minorities.
      • malandrew 10y ago
        For what it's worth, unemployment is actually higher among men than women: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpsee_e16.htm https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpsee_e16.htm That said, it's absurd to focus on individual identity groups. All who are willing to work and develop the necessary skills required by the market are deserving of employment irrespective of their demographic identity.
      • nemtaro 10y ago
        The YCs and large companies can easily move their investments and offices to Canada and hire the world's best and brightest there. I'll give you the often conservative advice: Tough luck? pull yourself up by your own boot straps! Go to school. Go back to school. Work hard, and interview with Google/Amazon/Microsoft again. And stop perpetuating the idea that you are at a disadvantage because of immigrants and refugees. If you end up with a job at Apple or eBay or Expedia btw, remember that your livelihood was made possible because of the hard work of immigrants and refugees.
        • mc32 10y ago
          In tech you don't have to be the first to market, you only have to have a market that's ready for you. Xiaomi, tencent, alibaba. Not fist to market. All doing well. All done with a very predominant domestic labor force. My point, is it's not do much the foreigner, or even the local, but the opportunities made available by your domestic economy.
        • 10y ago
  • isolli 10y ago
    It may be collective hypocrisy, but the poor today did not get rich after their ancestors got here, so in principle they owe nothing to the system.
  • tankenmate 10y ago
    Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor I'll piss on 'em / That's what the Statue of Bigotry says / Your poor huddled masses, let's club 'em to death / and get it over with and just dump 'em on the boulevard
    • tankenmate 10y ago
      I guess some people aren't Lou Reed fans. Some people saw this state of affairs long before it happened. p.s. this song was on the top of the modern rock charts for 4 weeks
    • supersaiyanverx 10y ago
      It's 2017. Trump is president. Nobody cares.
  • testUser69 10y ago
    This is the lamest argument that people use. This is a non-argument and I have no idea why it gets upvoted. You don't understand the economics of the situation. For one thing America isn't the only nation they can go to, go steal wealth from Canada. Second, for a very long time immigrants did help build America, but they were literally poor and willing to work mundane jobs for no minimum wage, and they came over here without being guaranteed a job. America was in a state of high economic entropy when it was first founded and we've now reached a state of low economic entropy. Letting everyone in the breadbasket live in poverty so that a few thousand people can go be corporate elitists is what is really selfish.
    • tim333 10y ago
      Immigrants stealing wealth is not really something that happens, economics wise. Usually it's the other way around.
      • Chris2048 10y ago
        Immigrants are a bargaining chip used by businesses to steal wage, e.g. Techtopus was called "wage theft".
  • eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >Kicking the door behind you closed once you've got yours or because you're afraid new immigrants will take your job is hypocrisy of a terrible kind for a nation that was founded on immigration. What about immigration from Kansas to California? We all know these tech companies prefer to hire from Stanford, MIT, and each-other. Why not just hire the proverbial kid from Brooklyn if we're so concerned about migration and diversity?
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      > Why not just hire the proverbial kid from Brooklyn if we're so concerned about migration and diversity? The diversity is just a fig leaf, the migration angle is mostly about money and very rarely about skill. Also, not everybody is willing to relocate for a job and people from poor countries have usually much less to lose.
      • eli_gottlieb 10y ago
        >The diversity is just a fig leaf, the migration angle is mostly about money and very rarely about skill. My point exactly.
    • vmarsy 10y ago
      > We all know these tech companies prefer to hire from Stanford, MIT, and each-other. Maybe you know, but around tech companies, I see more people from Georgia, Texas, Michigan, South Carolina ... than from Stanford or MIT. Tech companies need people with tech skills, so if University of Kansas produces skilled CS graduates, they'll also work in tech companies. If they don't, Kansas kids go study to Michigan, Texas, Georgia, MIT, Stanford, and end up working in those tech companies.
  • ygaf 10y ago
    I've never understood how it qualifies as hypocrisy to take an opportunity (e.g. get into a country), then shut other people out. If you found a pile of money in the street, is it hypocrisy to shut other people out?
    • jacquesm 10y ago
      > I've never understood how it qualifies as hypocrisy to take an opportunity (e.g. get into a country), then shut other people out. If you found a pile of money in the street, is it hypocrisy to shut other people out? The resource 'a pile of money' is something an individual or a small group of people can hoard and exhaust. Something the size of a continent not so much so yes, that's hypocrisy. America could easily operate on 25% of the landmass that it currently occupies (and it would probably be a much wealthier country, but that's another subject entirely). Most of it is empty space anyway (and this even goes for countries that appear at first sight to be densely populated such as the country where I currently reside, the Netherlands).
    • pm90 10y ago
      Well your analogy is not a good one :). The contract offered by America to Immigrants is not: come here and get this pile of money! Its always been: come here and you get an opportunity to work hard and possibly make a pile of money.
      • ygaf 10y ago
        The money was my analogy to that opportunity. Admittedly it's ambiguous.
  • geebee 10y ago
    I'm coming to this late, but I do want to point out that the US takes 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year, in a process that has essentially nothing to do with the H1B or employer controlled work visa programs. These immigrants are free to choose what they study and where they work. High tech doesn't like that, because smart educated people who have the right to choose can find better options than staring at a computer screen looking at JIRA tickets in a big loud open office, in a field where they get elbowed out after age 40. So high tech has lobbied for an alternative immigration system, that they control though their HR departments, where they get to decide who gets to come here and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain. I'm honestly bewildered when I read arguments like the one you just made, that opposing the H1B visa means you're opposed to immigration. I think that immigration has been a marvel for the US, but that pretty much every system we've tried for bringing in immigrants who are not free to choose their job has been an unmitigated disaster. The H1B is hardly the worst of these, but because it doesn't preserve the freedom of the individual, it is ultimately unfixable. It must be replaced by a system that allows the immigrant to decide what to study, where to work, how to live. It actually turns out we have a system like that, it's called immigration, and we take 1.2 millions people a year under it. From the way Silicon Valley talked it, you'd think that entire path didn't even exist.
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >Kicking the door behind you closed once you've got yours or because you're afraid new immigrants will take your job is hypocrisy There's nothing hypocritical about it. It can sure be called selfish, but not hypocritical. Hypocrisy is to pretend you support one thing, while doing another. Here they just stop supporting immigration after they themselves got in (and usually decades after they themselves got it -- it's not like some 2-years fresh American citizen is asking for a stop in immigration).
• mywittyname 10y ago
  Keep hammering the fact that these people are job producers, not consumers. If you can prove that one skilled H1B results in additional two jobs being created in the region, then it becomes an easier pill to swallow. I work in a rural region with a high number of H1Bs because one of the biggest companies in the area is a tech giant. Most people I've talked to (outside of tech) realize that these people bring in a lot value to the area and without them, 10s of millions of dollars would disappear from the local economy. I straight up tell people, when asked about H1Bs, that I wouldn't have a job if not for them. I've worked at too many companies where the star of the team was on an H1B.
  • coredog64 10y ago
    And as a counterpoint to your anecdata, I've worked with H1B co-workers whose only redeeming quality was the ability to provide CO2 for the plants in the office. They were net-negative contributors.
    • karmelapple 10y ago
      Is there anyway to grade the general effectiveness of H1B co-workers and how they compare to people with permanent residency or citizenship? Or even to compare different people of the same citizenship status? Have you also worked with H1B co-workers who did have redeeming qualities? I've known many people in all differing forms of work authorization and citizenship, and I haven't observed any strong correlation of competency and a person's immigration/citizenship status. I've seen people here on student or H1Bs who have worked particularly hard, because they know that school or their job is the only thing keeping them is the only thing keeping them in the USA, which is where they truly want to be. I've also seen US citizens work really hard because they care about their job, or just take pride in doing good work. And I've seen people of many different backgrounds just not be the best contributors, too. If a company keeps net-negative contributors around, that's to the company's detriment. If it eventually contributes to hurting the company enough that the person gets laid off or fired, that person will struggle to keep a job at a better-functioning company. And once someone with an H1B cannot find another job, they cannot stay in the country for very long.
  • 10y ago
• ma2rten 10y ago
  You didn't provide any hard numbers. As far as I know the tech industry is an important contributor to the American economy and if they decide or are forced to move those jobs to another country it would hurt America more than it would them.
• karmelapple 10y ago
  Do you have ideas of what a tech company could put on the table? I have a bit of an idea, and also a way to frame the problem that may sound a little ridiculous, but hopefully is helpful to someone. I propose tech, free-trade, outsourcing, and other forces have impacted the US job market similar to the problem laid out in The Innovator's Dilemma [1]. Apple - and Steve Jobs - have been applauded for figuring out ways to solve the innovator's dilemma; specifically, Apple lets newer products with a greater profit potential cannibalize older products' smaller profits. 1. The iPod classic and iPod nano were great products that had solid profits. 2. The iPod Touch ate into iPod classic and iPod nano profits. However, it also eclipsed the profits that the earlier iPods could have achieved, since it was much more than just a music player. 3. The iPod classic and iPod nano did not mind that they sold less, and Apple changed their expectations for sales from each product line accordingly as one product took sales away from other products. Here's how I see the US addressing a similar dilemma, but involving people's jobs: 1. Career tracks in manufacturing and energy production (coal, especially) had solid salaries and career prospects. 2. Market forces (e.g. trade deals, technology) reduced need for US manufacturing and energy production jobs. Computer programming, technology in general, and design of things rather than the manufacturing of things all have better profits for the companies involved than the building of things. 3. The people who had manufacturing and energy production jobs DO mind that they do not have a job. Government and society did NOT recalibrate goals by saying something like, "sorry your coal job experience is no longer relevant, we're going to give you basic income / job training / some other job prospects." Apple can make the iPod classic, whose qualities are outdated, simply go away from stores without a tear shed. The US cannot make people whose skills are outdated simply go away, though. Those people need, at a minimum, some way to pay the rent, food, and aspire to something greater than they have now. How should the US best address this? It makes as much sense to re-introduce the iPod classic when the iPod Touch is already out there as it does to go back to dirty energy production when clean energy production already out there, and has great qualities like an endless, easily accessible energy source in the sun and less pollution and land destruction. However, that very thing has been proposed, and I have not seen any other plans. What about, for instance, ensuring solar panel production facilities are built near where coal jobs went away? Or perhaps big wind farms, sun farms, etc? The places where coal is buried is not where wind or sun is best captured, but giving some kind of hope to people in those areas - whether in the form of subsidies, training, moving people, etc. It may mean some changes to those impacted, but with every big shift in technology and labor, some jobs simply are no longer necessary like they used to be. Thoughts? [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244 https://smile.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Ch...
• malandrew 10y ago
  Many of the tech companies create employment opportunities far larger than their own staff. eBay and Amazon both have huge markets of merchants. Apple, Google and Microsoft have all created massive markets for application developers. Uber, AirBnB and Lyft have all created lots of part-time and full-time income from underutilized personal assets.