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Having come from a poor American community into the tech world, I oppose justifying immigration with filling tech jobs. There are a whole lot of people in coun
by colechristensen 4y ago
Having come from a poor American community into the tech world, I oppose justifying immigration with filling tech jobs. There are a whole lot of people in country already very capable of learning to fill these jobs and very little industry or state encouragement or support to help them.
Siphoning away the most ambitious and capable people from around the world also hurts the places they are from.
To be clear I do support immigration, just not as an easier to acquire and cheaper source of skilled labor.
- ttyprintk 4y agoHN had a discussion on the program in Appalachia to try to find employable coders among economically dislocated mining engineers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19892155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19892155 Under this story about bootcamps there was also the experiment by Google to run fiber through those towns. I believe the lesson was that only a handful were employable as fully-remote devs.
- bombcar 4y agoThe key would be to cultivate the young. I expect I’d find it moderately hard to learn coal mining at my age and though I don’t believe it would have been impossible in my youth.
- jszymborski 4y agoThere are openings in Quebec for _every_ job. From the service to the tech to the civil sectors, there are vacancies in every sector. I think a major limitation to our immigration programmes is that it is too often limited to people with undergraduate or post-graduate degrees rather than skilled and unskilled workers of any stripe. But of course, I agree that increase in immigration needs to be balanced and met with social and financial support for those who immigrate.