12 ms·

I think if we ever start a second YC location, this will be the reason -- to help founders who are unable to get past the US immigration system. It's unfortuna

• foobarqux 12y ago
  How likely is that to happen?
• x0x0 12y ago
  If you are referring to recent proposed visa changes, you appear to be defining dysfunctional as not passing visa programs very beneficial to a tiny group of people: incubators like YC, and owners / large investors in tech dependent startups. As not a member of those groups, that's quite a stretch.
  • exstudent 12y ago
    And you know, everyone who's not xenophobic, enjoys living in a diverse community and philosophically believes people should be able to live wherever they want.
    • spamizbad 12y ago
      Strawman. Vivek Wadhwa scolded Democrats for not taking a deal proposed by the Republicans whereby 55K diversity visas in exchange for startup visas. [1] [1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/10/dear-congressman-gutierrez-please-lift-your-hold-on-silicon-valley/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/10/dear-congressman-gutierrez-... Startup visas have nothing to do with diversity. It has to do with enriching the US economy. Nothing wrong with that. I support the startup visa moment, but not at the expense of other visas. We should be giving more visas - not less or the same amount reclassified.
      • exstudent 12y ago
        I support open borders for the reasons I listed.
      • afafsd 12y ago
        >We should be giving more visas - not less or the same amount reclassified. True, but you should also be doing more to exclude the people who don't have visas, which is the main reason the US immigration system is currently broken. I lived in the US for a few years, did everything legally, queued up at embassies, paid endless fees, and saw that everywhere I went I was surrounded by people who had entered the country illegally and the US government wasn't doing a fucking thing about it. Eventually I decided "Fuck it", because if the US government is more interested in letting in a gazillion unskilled, non-English-speaking manual labourers who have already shown a complete disregard for its laws than it is in letting in me, then the US isn't a country that deserves me.
        • exstudent 12y ago
          What harm were those people actually causing you?
          • afafsd 12y ago
            It was more the moral outrage that happens when you do the right thing and see other people getting away with doing the wrong thing. It's like if you went to a supermarket and paid for your groceries and saw that you were the only person paying. Everyone else was just walking in, shoplifting, and walking straight out, and the managers weren't doing anything to stop it. That's not a supermarket I'd choose to keep going to.
          • dropit_sphere 12y ago
            While it would of course lower afasd's blood pressure to relax and let it go, his question needs to be considered. Anyone telling law-abiding would-be American immigrants to wait their turn comes off as either oblivious or downright malicious if they tacitly condone, um, "extralegal" immigration. As an American, frankly, it's embarrassing.
    • bruceb 12y ago
      Pretty much every country has limits on immigration. It is hardly unique to the US. There are different cultures and traditions in the world. It takes for people to adjust to a new country and the country to adjust to them.
      • blutoot 12y ago
        Actually white Americans don't seem to mind immigration from fellow white-majority countries, especially if it's from the developed ones. But that's an understandable phenomenon.
        • _delirium 12y ago
          They don't now only because there isn't a lot of it, so it's not a political issue. How many recent German or French immigrants are there in the US? Not enough for anyone to notice. Back when there was large-scale immigration from Europe though, a lot of people minded, and formed parties specifically to agitate against the Irish/Poles/etc. You see that now in Europe. UKIP isn't complaining only about muslim immigrants (though they complain about them loudest), but also about continental-European immigrants, especially eastern Europeans. I suspect something similar would happen in the U.S. if there were a large influx of European immigrants.
      • exstudent 12y ago
        The internet is a good example of a culture than can exist if you do away with artificial barriers between groups of people. Modern immigration policy is not inherently correct and it wasn't devised during an age of hyper connectivity.
        • prodigal_erik 12y ago
          If the Internet had to ensure housing, food, and transportation would be available for every participant, we would be a lot more selective about granting access. Open borders made sense in the age of unsettled land, and they make sense when the marginal cost of delivering everything (i.e., only information) is nearly zero.
    • x0x0 12y ago
      Claiming not wanting open borders == xenophobia is, well, good luck with that, champ.
      • exstudent 12y ago
        Why don't you want open borders? You haven't said why it's bad.
        • jtzhou 12y ago
          Immigration is very important for all countries, but assimilation takes time. (If you believe in the country enough to want to immigrate there, then the existing culture must have some value.) Ask Syria, Iraq or South Sudan, how they are enjoying their open borders. Meanwhile, Iceland, Japan and other countries are doing fine. Arguably, they could be richer if they allowed in more immigrants, but I'll take the rule of law over the chaos of uncontrolled borders.
          • potatolicious 12y ago
            Meh, as a visible minority I'd rather the open borders than the opposite. The Nordic countries, Japan, and others with historically xenophobic and anti-immigration attitudes have a "stronger" rule of law, and the illusion of fewer social ills, because they don't have to deal with the discomfort of a heterogeneous population. And now that immigration is increasing in these places the amount of racism being exposed is shocking, even when compared to the USA where racism has been front-and-center for decades. Hell, just look at HN threads whenever Muslim immigration to Sweden/Norway comes up, it's like Stormfront on steroids. Your argument has been levied against just about every immigrant population that's made its way into the US. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, all of whom were subject to enormous racist and xenophobic backlash, much of it under the guise of some vague notion of cultural integrity. All of the above populations have integrated into American society and in fact the US would be markedly poorer - economically and culturally - without them now. There's a small amount of schadenfruede I feel when I look at the struggles going on right now in previously-closed countries as they experience large-scale immigration for the first time. For years they tsk'ed tsk'ed at the US (and Canada) for their social upheaval, as people came to grips with living in a heterogeneous society, and criticized us for the many examples of blatant racism and xenophobia. Now that they're going through the same thing it makes me sad to see people from these very countries spouting the same justifications and views as Jim Crow-era America, as if they've learned literally nothing for themselves while observing us in judgment this whole time.
  • SilasX 12y ago
    The users of those resulting products benefit too, just like Tom Cruise isn't the only one who benefits from him selling his acting services.
  • paul 12y ago
    Given that I also mentioned state and local government, it should be clear that I'm referring to more than just immigration issues. I get your point though. I'm an evil capitalist who doesn't want to fund Americans because they are unwilling to give up 7% equity, or something like that. Maybe you think that Sergey Brin and Paul Graham stole their jobs from some hard working, native born Americans. That's the problem with zero-sum thinking. You believe that in order for a foreigner to get ahead, an American must be pushed back. I have the opposite view. I believe that much of America's success is rooted in having an open and inclusive culture that attracts smart, ambitious, and determined people from around the world who come here and pursue their dreams. And that when they succeed, we all benefit. To me, anti-immigrant is anti-American, both economically and ideologically.
    • pyre 12y ago
      Well, in some cases it's that the people coming from overseas are willing to get paid less for the same job. The 'evil capitalist' sees this as a way to get cheaper labor. I think that this can be alleviated without being anti-immigrant though. For example, make it easier for H1Bs to move between jobs and/or start their own businesses so that they don't have to feel so tied to the employer that they don't want to risk 'rocking the boat' too much. Or make it so that switching jobs doesn't 'reset the counter' on building up towards citizenship (or is it just a green card, I forget).
      • paul 12y ago
        Again, it's a zero-sum thinking error to assume that there's some fixed number of jobs and therefore more people equals lower pay. I would have made substantially less at Google if it weren't for all of the foreigners making the company a success :) I agree that H1B transfer restrictions are bad though. If people are good enough to let into the country, then they should be free to switch jobs just like anyone else.
        • pyre 12y ago
          > Again, it's a zero-sum thinking error to assume that there's some fixed number of jobs and therefore more people equals lower pay. I'm not stating the "more people" == "less pay". I'm stating that foreign workers are willing get paid less money, regardless of what the job pool is. They have fewer options available to them, so they accept "worse" pay for what maybe essentially the same job. Also, the amount of jobs that are available at any point in time is fixed. Jobs are created when a company has a need to fill. Jobs aren't created just because there is an excess supply of unemployed people. They don't spring into existence out of nowhere. Do companies create more positions just to accommodate the influx of foreign workers? Or do the amount of jobs stay the same regardless?
• ambrood 12y ago
  it is actually quite sad that things like "fairness for highly skilled immigrants" is held hostage to CIR.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • _delirium 12y ago
    I don't think it's necessarily a bad strategy. The coalition to pass immigration reform is a mixture of immigration-rights activists on the left-ish side of the spectrum, and business advocates on the right-ish side of the spectrum. If you produce some cutouts narrowly addressing the staffing needs of some of the more influential businesses, they drop out of the coalition (because their own needs are satisfied) without the overall system having been really fixed. (Plus, philosophically, I don't really support more H1B-type programs. If immigration is to be expanded, it should be proper immigration, not tied to employers, with a reasonable path to citizenship.)
    • blutoot 12y ago
      H1B is the only reasonable way a middle-class citizen of another nation can move to the US. Unless you can come up with a reasonable overnight replacement of that program, a lot of people will, rightfully, push for its expansion and not the other way around.
      • _delirium 12y ago
        I don't think "overnight replacements" are a good way to improve immigration; a series of quick hacks is largely what got us into the current mess. As for a specific replacement, I'd support a Canada-style non-sponsorship-based points system. Although I think there is something to be said for just randomness as well, such as expanding the Green Card lottery. Many of the immigrants who made large contributions to U.S. society/economy did not come in already highly educated/skilled, so I'm not sure it's a long-term advantage to restrict immigration to primarily people with strong pre-immigration skills/credentials. Short-term yes, since it fills shortages in areas of the economy, and I think a points system is a good way of handling that without the unsavory employer-tied aspect. But longer-term the "American dream" idea is that people should be able to gain those skills after immigrating; you can come in without already being the kind of person who can command six-figure job offers, and work your way up. Historically that's where a lot of the benefits of immigration have come from.
• cperciva 12y ago
  I think if we ever start a second YC location, this will be the reason Please do. Tarsnap will apply to be part of YC Vancouver if it happens. (I'm assuming that if you create a YC somewhere outside of the US it would be in Vancouver, because really, nowhere else in the world is anywhere near as awesome.) FWIW, I think there's two "markets" of which you've only mentioned one -- in addition to founders who can't get US visas, I know plenty of talented Canadians and Europeans who don't want to live in the US due to the current political climate.
  • HorizonXP 12y ago
    Adding my +1. I left the Valley to come back to Canada, because as awesome as the Valley is, I can't see myself building a life there. As an engineer, getting a visa is much easier than it is for most, but it's still an unnecessary stressor.
  • Zombieball 12y ago
    Obligatory +1 for launching in Vancouver!
  • McDoku 12y ago
    Real estate is better in Montreal. Was paying 2K for small loft 700sqft in Gastown vs 1.3K for a 1600sqft loft in Old Montreal with a view of the basilica. Startup dollars will go further here and the office will be twice as awesome. Much easier for new people to make friends and the art scene is not priced out. Montreal is undeniably more fun. And lord, the festivals... Mind you, winter lives here but it is sunny even when it snows. Rain will tends to drive most people in BC a bit wonky. I would say do Montreal if it is in the summer. Else BC. Or if it is about the quick plane ride to silicon valley, same deal.
    • fwilliams 12y ago
      As someone who grew up in Montreal, and moved to Silicon Valley, one of the appeals of SV is the weather. Montreal winters are long, cold, and dark. These are not conditions everyone wants to live in. Additionally, the Office De La Langue Francaise will make the life of any English company a nightmare. To top it all off, taxes in Quebec are absurdly high (especially considering the quality of social services). So while Montreal is a great city, I think it would be a poor choice for a YC office.
• moogoo 12y ago
  Unfortunately Paul you are just as engaged in wage suppression as the rest of the valley. There's no specific talent you need outside of the US. Its what your willing to pay you have a problem with. And for that reason you are a cancer.
• mark_eijsermans 12y ago
  +1 please do. As an accelerator connected to US capital & experience, same language/culture, and being in the same timezone with a 2hr flight, this can only mean great things. A lot of engineers in the community here (myself included) are not necessarily willing to give up life in beautiful Vancouver to move to an industrial park in Silicon Valley.
• nojvek 12y ago
  I am a MS employee waiting to move to the US. Just so frustrated by the system. After 15 months I've fallen in love with Vancouver. I come from Australia. Yes, the winter sucks, but as Engineers we spend a lot of time indoors and it doesn't make a huge difference. I would definitely apply for YC Vancouver. The tech community here is vibrant and growing.