4 ms·

A lot of Silicon Valley’s success is attributable to immigrants. Be careful what you wish for.

by afavour 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
antonymoose 9mo ago
Well, I initially had a snarky remark about Federal involvement in Silicon Valley but it seems that both Shockley and his Traitorous Eight were quite European in national origin.
- sl_convertible 9mo ago
  Federal involvement during WWII led to the founding of Silicon Valley.
observationist 9mo ago
This is overhyped by a lot. A lot of SV grift is attributable to exploited immigrants, too, it's not like it's a city of moral champions. H1B and other employment based immigration programs are some of the worst influences on the market, because people get screwed, wages suppressed for non immigrant workers, and the donor class for the uniparty are the ones paying for the status quo, and a big reason nothing ever gets fixed. I'm not a big fan of defacto indentured servitude or a lot of the crap people end up saddled with under the schemes immigration middlemen and agencies come up with to skim off wages, take government funding, and other grifts. I'm a big fan of success stories too, but those are almost always in spite of the immigration policies.
- kylecazar 9mo ago
  The current CEO's of Alphabet, MSFT, Nvidia, Uber, IBM, Adobe, AMD and many more are themselves immigrants. There was an article from last year about Meta's AI lab, claiming all top researchers were foreigners. If you look into the research teams in any of the big tech companies you will see they are riddled with people born abroad. It turns out if you want the best in the world, many won't be American born. Its not just about standard H1B's working in normal SWE roles. Immigrants hold key roles at key companies in SV and have a disproportionate influence on tech's direction. I agree with parent that we should be careful what we wish for. Found the Meta article: https://m.economictimes.com/nri/latest-updates/no-american-grads-on-metas-top-ai-team-all-11-hires-are-immigrants/articleshow/122247213.cms https://m.economictimes.com/nri/latest-updates/no-american-g...
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bjourne 9mo ago
    That's more of a damning indictment of the American education system than praise of immigration. I'm not a fan of autarky in general but it seems reasonable that a country should be self-sufficient in smart people.
    - kylecazar 9mo ago
      Its not intended as praise, but a reality-check on the status quo. Our leadership in science and tech has always been linked inextricably with sourcing talent from everywhere. You can look at immigrant Nobels, patents, enrollment in doctoral programs, representation in executive teams in tech companies, % of American unicorns founded by immigrants -- it will point to the same conclusion. Whether or not we should be self-sufficient is another matter, but we aren't even close, not in the highest echelons of STEM. I'm curious though, what country would serve as evidence that sourcing talent domestically alone can propel a nation to global leadership in these fields?
- bradlys 9mo ago
  It’s weird how people don’t recognize that most of these companies started with American founders who then decided to use exploitative labor policies including collusion then slowly became more and more detached - and hired other people to do the exploitation for them. Who better to do the exploitation than those who know the ins and outs of what makes the exploitees tick? Do people really have no clue that the rise of Leetcode has come from exam culture in eastern countries? Are they that clueless? I am one of the only Americans in my department at faang. The people I work with aren’t some special level of intelligence. It’s just not cool to work in tech and Americans know that. That’s why you see 2nd gen Asian Americans joining finance and going to nyc. They know it’s fucking lame.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
nitwit005 9mo ago
I've always been curious if it matters as much as people claim, or if the funding will just go to someone else with a similar result. We'll get to see if this becomes the new normal.
- ytoawwhra92 9mo ago
  > if the funding will just go to someone else with a similar result To Americans? They're being outcompeted for this funding despite having many significant advantages over the people they're competing with. I think it would be naive to expect people starting from a position of strength and getting outcompeted nonetheless to achieve "similar results" when given funding.
  - ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago
    "out competed" in this context means "not willing to work for less"
    - ytoawwhra92 9mo ago
      I was talking about founders, who are in direct competition with one another for VC funding. But if you want to talk about employees, what you're saying isn't really true. Sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and relocating immigrant workers is very expensive. For an immigrant to outcompete a citizen on cost they have to be significantly cheaper than the citizen - but if they're on an H1B you have to pay them the prevailing wage for their position! So there's a floor on just how much immigrant workers can undercut citizen workers. Immigration certainly puts downward pressure on wages across a whole industry, but looking at software in particular we see wages having risen consistently for decades now. You can look at what companies are paying their H1B software workers and see that it's typically a very generous wage by US standards. But, weirdly, a majority of US CS graduates don't work in software. It doesn't make sense that they would be holding out for more money than immigrant workers to the point that they end up exiting the industry altogether and taking a less lucrative job. Not to me, at least. I think what you're saying, if it's happening at all, is likely only happening at the bottom end of the market. Which kind of proves my point.
rayiner 9mo ago
That's like saying "a lot of Silicon Valley's success is attributable to people." It's not a useful statement without specificity. Key Silicon Valley companies like Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were founded during the highly restrictive immigration policy that prevailed between the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. Intel was founded just a few years after. A lot of golden age Silicon Valley companies were founded around or shortly after 1970, when the U.S. foreign-born population hit the lowest point in American history, under 5%. Of course, even during that period, we allowed in German scientists, leading professors, etc. It's a handful of people. The highly selective immigration policy that prevailed from 1924-1965 is likely a key reason why so many Silicon Valley companies were founded by immigrants. That has very little to do with this story, which is about reversing mass immigration.
- csa 9mo ago
  This comment is starting to turn gray for me, which means that it’s being downvoted. I don’t know much about this topic, but all of the factual content mentioned above seems to be true. Can anyone who disagrees with ‘rayiner here explain why they downvoted? Is it just an unpleasant observation? Is it a disagreement with his conclusion in the last few sentences? Is it just a downvote against the commenter (iirc, he tends to make conservative talking points)? Something else? I genuinely want to know, as this seems like it would be an important set of talking points around immigration as a whole that any policy maker would want to consider.
  - TimorousBestie 9mo ago
    From the guidelines: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
    - csa 9mo ago
      Thank you. I’m very familiar with the guidelines. I’ve think I can play my OG card on this one. I added substantial commentary that makes it more than a “why the down votes?” type of comment. ‘rayiner gets beat on here a bit due to what appears to be his conservative stances on some issues. While I don’t agree with many of the things ‘rayiner says, we can’t throw the baby out with the bath water if we’re going to have meaningful discussions here — especially ones that are intellectually stimulating. IMHO, one of the reasons we (in the US) are where we are politically is precisely because we ignore, or downvote, or denigrate views from the opposing side (whichever side that is). It’s not really prudent to blithely downvote a considered and articulate comment without commentary just because you disagree with it or dislike the implications. In the case of hacker news, this type of behavior is antithetical to the goals of the site — intellectually stimulating content. So, while I appreciate your citation of the rules (which may itself be a middlebrow dismissal), I stick by my original comment, and I look forward to anyone who could reply to it.
yahway 9mo ago
Is Silicon Valley a success? I would argue it has been an abject failure on culture and society at large. It has generated money for people by stealing every bit of data it can, but that really isnt success but for the few who can put theor fingers on that money stream. It has provided little past doomscrolling and narcissism fodder.
pohl 9mo ago
You’re understating it by only mentioning Silicon Valley. I’ve worked with lots of great people from all over the world who brought their talents and education here to be productive in our economy, and I’ve never stepped one foot in Silicon Valley. We’ve become an embarrassment.
- rayiner 9mo ago
  Being “productive in our economy” shouldn’t be the test. People are hardworking and productive all over the world. People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh work really fucking hard. That’s not what makes America different from Bangladesh. The test should be, if we put the immigrants on an empty plain, could they recreate Iowa or Massachusetts? I.e. a bottom-up democracy characterized by self-government, rule of law, weak extended family ties and strong civic institutions. Because if they couldn’t recreate those things they can’t maintain America. Instead, what’ll happen (and is happening) will be a slow reversion to the global mean. As we have seen time and time again with democracy experiments in the third world, these things are rare innovations and can’t be conveyed to other cultures just by writing government structures and laws down on paper. The corollary to that is that there is no guarantee we can perpetuate these things in America against immigration just because they’re written down on paper.
  - vharuck 9mo ago
    A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test. The Amish have very strong extended family ties, and I think Pennsylvania would lose a lot of its culture if the Amish disappeared or assimilated. Do you have any examples of immigrant groups establishing or asking control of communities in the US without self-government, rule of law, or strong civic institutions?
    - rayiner 9mo ago
      You don’t end up with communities that lack those things entirely, because they’re within America. Instead, what happens is that higher organizational units compensate by imposing the organization that’s lacking internally. These communities become dependent on others to provide law, organization, and civic institutions. That distorts the structure of society, making it a top-down structure rather than a bottom-up structure. The lack of social cohesion between different cultural groups further increases the need for top-down control and administration to manage that conflict. But I don’t think that’s sustainable over generations. Because over time those immigrants will start changing the culture of the host population. > A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test Well we created a lot of national myths in the mid 20th century to reconcile our historic immigration trajectory. But we have a lot of data from which we should be able to draw conclusions. If we take Denmark as the benchmark for rule of law, civic institutions, and good governance, which place looks more like that: Minnesota, or New Jersey? The answer to that question should guide our immigration policy.
acdha 9mo ago
Far beyond Silicon Valley: for example, we used to rely on immigrants to fill medical jobs – roughly ¼ of doctors, for example: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/how-immigrant-doctors-fill-critical-gap-in-u-s-healthcare-system/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/how-immigrant...

A lot of Silicon Valley’s success is attributable to immigrants. Be careful what you wish for.

by afavour 9mo ago

A lot of Silicon Valley’s success is attributable to immigrants. Be careful what you wish for.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

antonymoose 9mo ago

Well, I initially had a snarky remark about Federal involvement in Silicon Valley but it seems that both Shockley and his Traitorous Eight were quite European in national origin.

sl_convertible 9mo ago
Federal involvement during WWII led to the founding of Silicon Valley.

observationist 9mo ago

This is overhyped by a lot. A lot of SV grift is attributable to exploited immigrants, too, it's not like it's a city of moral champions. H1B and other employment based immigration programs are some of the worst influences on the market, because people get screwed, wages suppressed for non immigrant workers, and the donor class for the uniparty are the ones paying for the status quo, and a big reason nothing ever gets fixed. I'm not a big fan of defacto indentured servitude or a lot of the crap people end up saddled with under the schemes immigration middlemen and agencies come up with to skim off wages, take government funding, and other grifts. I'm a big fan of success stories too, but those are almost always in spite of the immigration policies.

kylecazar 9mo ago
The current CEO's of Alphabet, MSFT, Nvidia, Uber, IBM, Adobe, AMD and many more are themselves immigrants. There was an article from last year about Meta's AI lab, claiming all top researchers were foreigners. If you look into the research teams in any of the big tech companies you will see they are riddled with people born abroad. It turns out if you want the best in the world, many won't be American born. Its not just about standard H1B's working in normal SWE roles. Immigrants hold key roles at key companies in SV and have a disproportionate influence on tech's direction. I agree with parent that we should be careful what we wish for. Found the Meta article: https://m.economictimes.com/nri/latest-updates/no-american-grads-on-metas-top-ai-team-all-11-hires-are-immigrants/articleshow/122247213.cms https://m.economictimes.com/nri/latest-updates/no-american-g...
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- bjourne 9mo ago
  That's more of a damning indictment of the American education system than praise of immigration. I'm not a fan of autarky in general but it seems reasonable that a country should be self-sufficient in smart people.
  - kylecazar 9mo ago
    Its not intended as praise, but a reality-check on the status quo. Our leadership in science and tech has always been linked inextricably with sourcing talent from everywhere. You can look at immigrant Nobels, patents, enrollment in doctoral programs, representation in executive teams in tech companies, % of American unicorns founded by immigrants -- it will point to the same conclusion. Whether or not we should be self-sufficient is another matter, but we aren't even close, not in the highest echelons of STEM. I'm curious though, what country would serve as evidence that sourcing talent domestically alone can propel a nation to global leadership in these fields?
bradlys 9mo ago
It’s weird how people don’t recognize that most of these companies started with American founders who then decided to use exploitative labor policies including collusion then slowly became more and more detached - and hired other people to do the exploitation for them. Who better to do the exploitation than those who know the ins and outs of what makes the exploitees tick? Do people really have no clue that the rise of Leetcode has come from exam culture in eastern countries? Are they that clueless? I am one of the only Americans in my department at faang. The people I work with aren’t some special level of intelligence. It’s just not cool to work in tech and Americans know that. That’s why you see 2nd gen Asian Americans joining finance and going to nyc. They know it’s fucking lame.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

nitwit005 9mo ago

I've always been curious if it matters as much as people claim, or if the funding will just go to someone else with a similar result. We'll get to see if this becomes the new normal.

ytoawwhra92 9mo ago
> if the funding will just go to someone else with a similar result To Americans? They're being outcompeted for this funding despite having many significant advantages over the people they're competing with. I think it would be naive to expect people starting from a position of strength and getting outcompeted nonetheless to achieve "similar results" when given funding.
- ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago
  "out competed" in this context means "not willing to work for less"
  - ytoawwhra92 9mo ago
    I was talking about founders, who are in direct competition with one another for VC funding. But if you want to talk about employees, what you're saying isn't really true. Sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and relocating immigrant workers is very expensive. For an immigrant to outcompete a citizen on cost they have to be significantly cheaper than the citizen - but if they're on an H1B you have to pay them the prevailing wage for their position! So there's a floor on just how much immigrant workers can undercut citizen workers. Immigration certainly puts downward pressure on wages across a whole industry, but looking at software in particular we see wages having risen consistently for decades now. You can look at what companies are paying their H1B software workers and see that it's typically a very generous wage by US standards. But, weirdly, a majority of US CS graduates don't work in software. It doesn't make sense that they would be holding out for more money than immigrant workers to the point that they end up exiting the industry altogether and taking a less lucrative job. Not to me, at least. I think what you're saying, if it's happening at all, is likely only happening at the bottom end of the market. Which kind of proves my point.

rayiner 9mo ago

That's like saying "a lot of Silicon Valley's success is attributable to people." It's not a useful statement without specificity. Key Silicon Valley companies like Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were founded during the highly restrictive immigration policy that prevailed between the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. Intel was founded just a few years after. A lot of golden age Silicon Valley companies were founded around or shortly after 1970, when the U.S. foreign-born population hit the lowest point in American history, under 5%. Of course, even during that period, we allowed in German scientists, leading professors, etc. It's a handful of people. The highly selective immigration policy that prevailed from 1924-1965 is likely a key reason why so many Silicon Valley companies were founded by immigrants. That has very little to do with this story, which is about reversing mass immigration.

csa 9mo ago
This comment is starting to turn gray for me, which means that it’s being downvoted. I don’t know much about this topic, but all of the factual content mentioned above seems to be true. Can anyone who disagrees with ‘rayiner here explain why they downvoted? Is it just an unpleasant observation? Is it a disagreement with his conclusion in the last few sentences? Is it just a downvote against the commenter (iirc, he tends to make conservative talking points)? Something else? I genuinely want to know, as this seems like it would be an important set of talking points around immigration as a whole that any policy maker would want to consider.
- TimorousBestie 9mo ago
  From the guidelines: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
  - csa 9mo ago
    Thank you. I’m very familiar with the guidelines. I’ve think I can play my OG card on this one. I added substantial commentary that makes it more than a “why the down votes?” type of comment. ‘rayiner gets beat on here a bit due to what appears to be his conservative stances on some issues. While I don’t agree with many of the things ‘rayiner says, we can’t throw the baby out with the bath water if we’re going to have meaningful discussions here — especially ones that are intellectually stimulating. IMHO, one of the reasons we (in the US) are where we are politically is precisely because we ignore, or downvote, or denigrate views from the opposing side (whichever side that is). It’s not really prudent to blithely downvote a considered and articulate comment without commentary just because you disagree with it or dislike the implications. In the case of hacker news, this type of behavior is antithetical to the goals of the site — intellectually stimulating content. So, while I appreciate your citation of the rules (which may itself be a middlebrow dismissal), I stick by my original comment, and I look forward to anyone who could reply to it.

yahway 9mo ago

Is Silicon Valley a success? I would argue it has been an abject failure on culture and society at large. It has generated money for people by stealing every bit of data it can, but that really isnt success but for the few who can put theor fingers on that money stream. It has provided little past doomscrolling and narcissism fodder.

pohl 9mo ago

You’re understating it by only mentioning Silicon Valley. I’ve worked with lots of great people from all over the world who brought their talents and education here to be productive in our economy, and I’ve never stepped one foot in Silicon Valley. We’ve become an embarrassment.

rayiner 9mo ago
Being “productive in our economy” shouldn’t be the test. People are hardworking and productive all over the world. People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh work really fucking hard. That’s not what makes America different from Bangladesh. The test should be, if we put the immigrants on an empty plain, could they recreate Iowa or Massachusetts? I.e. a bottom-up democracy characterized by self-government, rule of law, weak extended family ties and strong civic institutions. Because if they couldn’t recreate those things they can’t maintain America. Instead, what’ll happen (and is happening) will be a slow reversion to the global mean. As we have seen time and time again with democracy experiments in the third world, these things are rare innovations and can’t be conveyed to other cultures just by writing government structures and laws down on paper. The corollary to that is that there is no guarantee we can perpetuate these things in America against immigration just because they’re written down on paper.
- vharuck 9mo ago
  A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test. The Amish have very strong extended family ties, and I think Pennsylvania would lose a lot of its culture if the Amish disappeared or assimilated. Do you have any examples of immigrant groups establishing or asking control of communities in the US without self-government, rule of law, or strong civic institutions?
  - rayiner 9mo ago
    You don’t end up with communities that lack those things entirely, because they’re within America. Instead, what happens is that higher organizational units compensate by imposing the organization that’s lacking internally. These communities become dependent on others to provide law, organization, and civic institutions. That distorts the structure of society, making it a top-down structure rather than a bottom-up structure. The lack of social cohesion between different cultural groups further increases the need for top-down control and administration to manage that conflict. But I don’t think that’s sustainable over generations. Because over time those immigrants will start changing the culture of the host population. > A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test Well we created a lot of national myths in the mid 20th century to reconcile our historic immigration trajectory. But we have a lot of data from which we should be able to draw conclusions. If we take Denmark as the benchmark for rule of law, civic institutions, and good governance, which place looks more like that: Minnesota, or New Jersey? The answer to that question should guide our immigration policy.

acdha 9mo ago

Far beyond Silicon Valley: for example, we used to rely on immigrants to fill medical jobs – roughly ¼ of doctors, for example: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/how-immigrant-doctors-fill-critical-gap-in-u-s-healthcare-system/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/how-immigrant...