Those are all good points, but the rest of the world turns out, pound for pound, Engineers that are just as good and crazy.
But have access to fewer resources, networks, capital, markets etc..
Also, the % of US immigrants that are on the 'high end' is relatively smaller.
Migration to the US, when you include off the books migration, is a little bit towards the low skilled end.
But definitely the smaller relative portion of 'hardcore talent' is still actually quite large in real terms, and yes, they do disproportionately contribute. It frankly doesn't take a large quantity.
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.
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.
Yet there's no shortage of foreign talent. A friend works for a major engineering firm in the US. At one point his office had thirty engineers and technicians. They came from thirty different countries and none were American. The dysfunction seems to be at a higher level.
US engineering wages are 4-5x of what they are in other similarly developed countries. The reason for that is a whole ecosystem of succesful startups/tech companies.
High quality talent from abroad improves the competitiveness of the US ecosystem and drains talent from other ecosystems. I'm going to go ahead and guess that US wages actually go up with less restrictive immigration policies.
Brain drain doesn’t mean that all top talent is gone, but rather that there is less of it than there would have been otherwise.
That this is happening between Europe and US is beyond clear: European engineers often emigrate to US, but American engineers emigrate much more rarely to Europe.
Unless I misunderstand the underlying argument, more skilled immigration is argued to be good because it is good for business. That's an economic argument, and I was making an economic argument in turn, that more skilled immigration may not straightforwardly result in a bigger talent pool in the US.
On the moral side, I do wonder if the West will be criticized in 50 years for its intellectual draining of the third world, not unlike the West's draining of colonies' natural resources 50 or 100 or more years ago. But this is a favorite thought experiment of mine, the question of "What currently fashionable thing will our grandchildren denounce us for doing?"
Anyway, you're disputing my assertion that "People choose careers for social reasons as well as for money. Adding a significant fraction of third world immigrants to a career lowers that career's prestige, meaning that talented natives who might have joined the field are less likely to, since they have options." First of all, I wish I had written that better in that I don't mean "a career", but rather "our career", ie, technology / programming. My mistake.
Still, doctors are a poor example since their supply is constrained by an outside force (medical education and licensing), and so their salaries are higher than they'd otherwise be, and their power is based on our awe for people who can save human life. In other words, they are nothing like programmers.
Also, I have heard that many governments like importing foreign doctors since in some cases this offloads parts of their education to their native land, and training doctors is expensive. Probably not the point you're looking for.
As for founders, I am not certain individual founders matter much in the cultural image of tech as a career. Most non-Californians can't name many founders, and certainly not many foreign born founders. I suspect that the only founders who get many people to consider tech to be a possible career are Jobs and Zuckerberg.
But as for programmers, people have various ideas floating around in their heads. They remember outsourcing, where American programmers ended up with no power and no money. This didn't do much for the prestige of the career. They think of nerds, obviously, who aren't too great on social norms. Does it seem reasonable that adding people to that labor market who are accustomed to lower living standards (wages), locked in by restrictive visas (power), and unfamiliar with American social norms (nerds) is actually going to make the field more attractive to natives?
I think you misunderstood what I said about degrees. I wasn't comparing degrees from different countries, I was only comparing degrees acquired in the U.S. by U.S. citizens.
Your original point was that there shouldn't be a shortage of talent in the U.S.: that companies should be able to find enough U.S. workers for things like engineering jobs. And I'm saying that there may not actually be enough local talent; it depends on how many U.S. citizens choose the "hard" degree programs that companies want.
There's lots of money to be made by U.S. citizens in certain sectors such as finance. It's conceivable that some U.S. students would opt for an "easier" degree if that still leads to a high-paying job; they may see no point in the extra work of a "hard" program like science or engineering.
Clearly not all U.S. citizens do that, and those that do choose engineering are just as employable, or more so, than immigrant engineers; I never said they weren't.
There are almost 8 billion people in the world and 320 million in the US. Of course most talent is foreign. No one who wants green cards for engineers is arguing for a decrease in education funding
This paper examines only those who are extraordinarily able: Nobel Prize winners, Fields Medalists, and International Math Olympiad medalists.
It's interesting, but the current HN headline ("Migrants to the US are up to 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere") seems misleading. The paper is taking up < 0.01% of "migrants to the U.S."
57% of silicon valley tech workers and 43% of New York tech workers are immigrants, so advances made by American companies are not necessarily made by domestic American workers.
I'd argue that USA has lots of high quality tech workers mostly thanks to brain drain and its size.
I think there's a difference between the sort of high-skill and/or wealthy immigrants that create billion dollar tech companies and the low-skill immigrants that americans are mostly mad about.
The author focuses on physical presence in a country, but as she points out, immigrants flocked to the US because it's an economic powerhouse. This will not change, and for all intents and purposes the talent will still be in the US, since their work will be in the US. If anything, it will make it even stronger, since most of the interesting things in e.g. tech are done there, and there is now less of a barrier to get the talent. Big fish will eat the small fish, you can see this clearly in e.g. the EU, where "talent" from smaller poorer countries goes to richer countries massively, since there are effectively no borders or barriers.
So they might not be there physically, but this is not really a big concern if you're a US company. It might be different for the country as a whole though.
I have a (related) counterpoint. The real problem is that there just aren't that many good US-educated engineers. This boils down to the US's weird college system, where either parents have to save up for their children's tuitions, or the people have to be lucky to get a scholarship.
The US is not a land of equal opportunity when it comes to education, which is costing a lot of potential talent to be lost. There's some improvement in 'free' online courses, but that's still only a patch next to a formal education.
If the US would invest more in its people and their educations, they wouldn't need as much foreign talent.
(spreading work out over the country instead of focusing it in SF would also help)
Are you arguing those other countries haven’t benefited from highly skilled immigration? I’m from one of those countries and higher education is filled with skilled immigrants.
And the US’ success in attracting highly skilled immigrants isn’t only due to the immigration system itself. In fact. In many cases it’s in spite of it.
Sure, but the talent itself does consider those things. Educated immigrants certainly do; I know several people who have chosen to migrate to the EU over the US in no small part due to the social safety net and better work-life balance, or decided that they'd rather stay where they are in the 3rd world over moving to the US.
The world is a different place than it used to be in the dotcom boom; tech talent has a lot more options nowadays and those things add up.
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.
I think saying that the tech industry is only a small fraction of our total economy (and the world economy in general). It's a huge growth engine, but most of the jobs and companies out there aren't tech related. If we place too much of an emphasis on recruiting engineers, we risk shutting out other skilled (and unskilled) immigrants.
Plenty of immigrants come to America with little more than a strong work ethic and a dream. They may have been too poor or disadvantaged to have afforded college, let alone an engineering degree, in their native countries. Hell, some of their native countries may not even have such opportunities. If we're restricting our search to highly skilled, highly educated workers, we're discriminating against everyone else who wants to participate in the American Dream.
Lest we assume these people are necessarily undesirable, we should be reminded of the fact that many of our most successful and quintessentially "American" companies were founded by originally unskilled immigrant laborers. Andrew Carnegie is perhaps the most famous example. His family emigrated to the US from Scotland, dirt poor and uneducated. His first job was as a messenger boy. He grew, of course, to become one of America's wealthiest and most productive captains of industry. He didn't have the status "captain of industry" before applying to enter the US. He gained that status in the US, via the opportunities afforded by the US to someone of his work ethic and intelligence. (And even the less-than-Carnegian immigrants of the world fill crucial roles in our economy).
Now, I disagree with the author in that he thinks a focus on engineers is necessarily a zero-sum game: that placing an emphasis on skilled workers precludes unskilled workers. It doesn't have to. I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater on Zuckerberg's argument, just because it's limited in scope. There's probably a lot more help than harm done by the sorts of reforms the group is seeking.
But have access to fewer resources, networks, capital, markets etc..
Also, the % of US immigrants that are on the 'high end' is relatively smaller.
Migration to the US, when you include off the books migration, is a little bit towards the low skilled end.
But definitely the smaller relative portion of 'hardcore talent' is still actually quite large in real terms, and yes, they do disproportionately contribute. It frankly doesn't take a large quantity.
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