US citizens have excellent mobility also internationally. Valley engineers certainly can find jobs in e.g. Europe or other parts of the world (if they accept the cut in paycheck). Immigration is not a thing only for poor third world people.
1. It's awfully presumptuous for you to assume that all these people are just raring to come to the US and the only thing holding them back is the lack of a startup visa. Perhaps people don't live in the US because they want to live where they are?
2. Sheer numbers don't mean shit. The Valley has the best concentration of engineering talent anywhere. Opening up the floodgates to anyone and everyone isn't necessarily a good idea.
Eastern Europe is notorious for highly skilled engineers. Because careers in Engineering and natural sciences have a long history and have always been viewed as prestigious positions.
And not everyone has emigrated to California, some have but US emigration is just too rigid. Many of us would want to move to SV, but unless we want to endure H1B slavery status our doors are pretty much closed.
However if anyone out there wants to take a shot at hiring some of us as contract workers, contact me.
I am from a milieu with excellent Engineering talent and could easily build a 5-10 man team of excellent engineers at roughly 60.000$ annual price point.
The companies that hire these engineers either pay them to work there or pay them to work here. So you are competing with them regardless. But the US can benefit from both migrant farm workers and skilled laborer immigrants. And unless you're one of the few natives in the US, your ancestors got the same benefit. Let's just let them immigrate here and then we get the benefit of their expertise and their culture.
My case is more about motivating smart people to come into US. Current system is broken.
Immigration system is byzantine and unpredictable. Person can even get kicked out with very short notice. And frankly salary in US quite often does not even cover expenses (rent, insurances, taxes...).
Semiconductor engineer from Taiwan has options in mainland China, Singapore, UAE... If you count expenses (living, travel and legal), cultural values, taxes... This engineer may actually make more money outside of US!
To be fair, if engineers from other countries can earn more money in America, that's an indication that their skills are better put to use here than elsewhere.
How much of SV are immigrant engineers in general although? Is it really the USA or just the fact it became a hollywood and it's gravity keeps it going?
This hits the nail on its head. The reason why SV is so attractive to potential immigrants isn't because of its living standard of thousands of homeless people the healthcare, transportation or housing system.
It's because the scarcity of that particular labor makes it on one of the best paid tech sectors in the world. Most people go there for the money even if they may stay for other things. Well that, and the fact that other highly skilled people compete for those few spots available, which means you might be surrounded by interesting peers.
China for example has 10x as many communication network engineer graduates as the whole of Europe altogether. That's ignoring the fact that a significant number of graduates are migrants themselves. I believe China and India have the longest Green Card waiting lists.
If it were a tiny fraction there would have to be an equally large opposite force keeping that engineer from immigrating to the US, and as onerous and terrible as the visa process is, I don't think it will prevent the best from migrating for better wages, even temporarily.
Not to mention a lot of very skilled European engineers move to US (sometimes Canada). It's easy to brag about talent when being on the receiving side of the brain drain.
It sucks, but these people are not citizens in the country they work in, so I don't see how they have any kind of right to stay here. They're only here because the government here allowed it, for a while, with a temporary worker visa.
Now, it seems pretty obvious to me that these people are probably much more productive and better contributors to this country and its economy than most of our own natural-born citizens, but the fact that we're losing them means we're basically shooting ourselves in the foot. The US isn't the only country where skilled engineers can find good work; these people should be able to find good jobs in another country where they can get a better deal w.r.t. immigration. Germany seems like it's much more welcoming to highly-skilled immigrants, for instance.
I think this should be a cautionary tale to skilled immigrants.
That's a very superficial analysis. These engineers are not native to Mountain View, usually not even native to California, and sometimes not native to the US.
Several of the highly productive engineers born and raised in Paris moved to Mountain View, because their in-demand skills allowed them to get a high paying job.
Their worth is not set by the Mountain View office - they were moved there because of their worth.
If you remove those borders, you still have the same highly skilled engineers in demand, the only difference is that a company doesn't need to pay for their visa and relocation anymore.
A university-educated electrical engineer doesn't want to be an illegal immigrant and the employers that need his skills won't hire illegal immigrants either.
So this is only really true for people willing to work illegally, like migrant farm workers. Presumably the US wants a wider mix of immigrants beyond that.
I want to thank Ruchi for this testimony. Like Ruchi, I feel extremely fortunate to be able to work in US.
US will continue to be 'the' destination for engineers of all kind for many years to come. Right now, a sheer number of open engineering positions and superior pay alone are attracting qualified engineers around the world. But other countries around the world are closing the gap slowly. In order to continue the domination in attracting engineers, it would be in US's best interest to simplify immigration process for qualified engineers.
"The demographic makeup of SV engineers was overwhelmingly white American until around a dozen years ago."
A dozen years ago was 1997. Do you seriously think this is true?
"With the importation of so many engineers into the US, wages were suppressed..."
You seem to think that white Americans work hard to "create" jobs, which are then "stolen" by hordes of immigrants. In other words, white Americans "give" and immigrants "take". That's just not how it works.
Immigrants in SV are on average smarter and work harder than Americans - not because there's something wrong with Americans, but because these immigrants are a highly biased sample of the world's huge population.
It would be far from useless for your employer for you to take less money, but fair enough.
Growing the labor pool is far from good when the goal is what passes for leadership in the valley -- pmarca, zuckerberg, larry page, et all -- are really advocating: avoid investing in education, or growing the workforce domestically, in favor of importing cheap foreign-educated labor which can then be exploited via our pseudo-indentured servitude h1b system. Most of these folks already let their ethics show w/ their engineering wage cram-down, along with their tax avoidance schemes which reduce funds to the government which heavily subsidizes their industries via, for example, public support of education of the skilled employees.
There are plenty of good engineers available in the US. You can do any of:
hire remote employees
pay better so that people can afford to live in the valley without making huge financial sacrifices, or use your leadership role to attack any of the things (transport, nimby, lack of housing, lack of dense housing) that make living in the valley so expensive
foster an engineering pipeline and work culture that doesn't systematically exclude women (double your potential employee base alone), plus other minorities
But since they make none of these changes, I oppose any increase in visa allotments.
reply