The Impact of Immigrant Innovators

Ramakrishnan writes "The Wall Street Journal is carrying a report on immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs. According to the piece, nearly a quarter of all California startups which went into business between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant as a founding member. These businesses, together, employ almost half a million workers and generated about $50 billion in sales in the year 2005. The study seems quite topical, given recent discussions in the U.S. capital. From the article: 'Supporters of an immigration bill are likely to use the study to argue the importance of foreign-born workers to the U.S. economy. An immigration bill passed by the last Congress and heavily lobbied by business groups would have greatly increased the number of green cards available to skilled workers. Business has long argued that the U.S. schools aren't turning out enough scientists, mathematicians and engineers, and that the economy will lose its competitive edge without more skilled foreign workers.'"

Comments

Re:If only...

[celardore]

As an immigrant myself, who is paying on average around 25K GBP a year in taxes and NI (in other words, I'm paying about an average UK salary), who's never received a single penny in welfare payments, I get rather pissed off at assholes like you making generalizations. In fact, all the immigrants I know fall in the "inventive" kind - at least half a dozen of which are co-founders of VC funded startups, and paying similar levels of tax as I am. Tell you what, I'm happy to sacrifice my Slashdot Karma and tell you to fuck right off. You say you're paying 25,000gbp in tax? Fuck you. Fuck you so hard. If you're paying THAT MUCH TAX you shouldn't even be on the internet. Fuck off dickhead. What the hell do you do to pay that much in tax?

Re:rings a bell

[ScrewMaster]

You mean like Albert Einstein?

Now that's just goofy. Nobody in their right mind is arguing that anyone who was born in another nation is of no value to American society, and you don't have to be an Einstein to figure that out. On the other hand, a bonafide genius like Einstein (or Tesla, or von Braun, or Fermi, or any of the other remarkable immigrants that will no doubt be brought up as an example of how America is wrong to put its own people first) makes a poor example. He was an exception, someone that we would have made room for under any conditions. But ... we're not talking about those. We're talking about the rank-and-file scientific and technology people in the U.S. that are being hit very hard by U.S. foreign and economic policy at the moment.

If there aren't enough workers in a particular industry, you raise salaries until enough people are attracted those fields and the shortfall is taken up. Salaries then level out or drop off once there is sufficient competition. What you don't do, if you're capable of thinking beyond the end of your nose, is start hiring foreign workers willy-nilly at a fraction of the salary you would have paid those domestic workers. Personally, I don't understand how the people in charge don't grasp the long-term consequences of their actions. Worse, once you've managed to eliminate your pool of domestic labor (which seems to be the desired result here) what are the odds that those H-1Bs will continue to work for peanuts? Zero, that's what, because you killed off their only competition. Some of these guys need to take a class in basic ecology.

What is being disputed, and rightfully so, is the ongoing displacement (i.e., PC for "shafting") of United States citizens in favor of foreign nationals who aren't citizens and (unless President Bush finally succeeds in completely eradicating the distinction between the two) probably never will be. In addition, because they are foreign nationals, we have no expectation of their remaining loyal to their U.S. employers or to our country, and those who eventually return to their homelands take whatever they've learned with them. If you're lucky, they just take back techniques and skills ... if you're not, they take back your designs and prototypes. I've seen this firsthand, folks, and it isn't pretty.

America can easily keep its competitive edge by training more technical and scientific minds from its own population (like everybody else does.) This nonsense about "labor shortages" and "the American worker is substandard" to justify the use of large quantities of imported talent is simply MBA-speak for "we're cheap, shortsighted motherfuckers who will bone our fellow Americans up the ass to save buck on payroll." I'm not buying it, sorry. I don't know why America is supposed to be an exception to the basic rules under which all other nations operate ... I guess it's because our political leaders and our (ahem!) "Captains of Industry" (which in Slashdot lingo translates to "fucktards") are easily exploited and have sold us down the economic river.

And before anyone starts complaining about the "global economy" and "what about the foreign tech worker?" Well, I'll tell you ... I don't care. Neither of those two phenomena have caused us anything but heartache and pain. From the giant textile mills lying fallow back East, to the devastation of our domestic electronics manufacturing, to all the industrial ghost-towns around where I live, I can't see the benefit, really. What I do see is a massive transfer of wealth (and the capacity to create wealth) out of the United States, to our detriment.

Furthermore, when I see nations like India and China evincing the slightest (the slightest!) concern for the damage they are doing to the United States maybe I'll think differently. And yes, you can put Mexico on the short list as well. But I'll tell you this: none of t