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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.'"
The Wall Street Journal is carrying a report on immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs.
You mean like Albert Einstein?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I'm tired of people not addressing the distinction between skilled workers trying to immigrate and improve their lives while also boosting our economy, and the people who hop the fence illegally just to take advantage of health care they won't have to pay for and a lack of responsibility for income taxes.
Immigration is great. It strengthens America as a whole. Illegal immigration sucks money from the economy and stresses our entire infrastructure. I would say these statistics have near nothing to do with recent discussions in congress, but then again, what do I know? I'm a bear! I suck the heads off fish!
We (I and other) Americans aren't as skilled or hard working as foreigners, so our solution is to just let more immigrants in? How about stepping up to the plate and showing the rest of the world that we can function on our own with as little help from others as possible! If our best solution is to let someone else do the job right, what does that say about our work ethic and ingenuity as a country?
If you consider that emmigrating from one country to another generally takes a lot of courage and initiative, these statistics are not really surprising. Talented and educated people who are motivated to make that leap are probably going to be motivated to do a lot more once they get here.
My girlfriend's mom is from the Phillipines, where the economy is pretty much shit-astic. Her dream, as a young girl in the Phillipines, was to come to America and make enough money to support a family and drive a Mercedes--which she accomplished. This report makes sense to me, because it's natural that a lot of people coming from poorer countries come to America because they're sick of living somewhere poor, and thus have a lot of ambition to make good money. Just my thoughts.
Freelance Web Designer - Portfolio
I believe in freedom and liberty for all men.
And by all men, I don't just mean the men in this country.
I don't see how any man can ethically justify excluding others from the land in which they live.
If a man from India, or Zimbabwae, or Sweden - where-ever - wishes to come here, the only basis upon which we could deny them is self-defence.
How can we say - all men are born free and equal - and then say "ah, but you lot can't come in".
Even in Britain, hardworking immigrants greatly outnumber the useless twats like Omar Bakri.
Immigrants cost me a fortune in tax.
Indolent people cost you money, whether they're immigrants or home-grown. Don't kid yourself, there are plenty of native-born losers there too.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There's an interesting point the article implicitly makes: Who's doing the complaining about lack of skilled workers? Businesses.
Our econonmy hasn't collapsed yet, so I would say that there are enough skilled workers to meet the needs of business employment. Businesses want more of such skilled workers simply so the market will be flooded, and they can pay their workers less, demand more from them (You want to keep your job, don't you?), and overall make it an employer's market.
This is pure self-serving bullshit, not concern for the US economy.
My dad immigrated from India to the U.K., and then moved to Ireland. He's a plastic surgeon and helped fix a lot of terrible injuries. Hes now an Irish citizen. He bought his own house and his own car and happily pays taxes that go towards keeping other people of the dole. His story isn't my any means unique and he is the sort of person this article is talking about. Sure, there are economic migrants and many of them don't do well. That is the point of this article - a point you appear to have completely missed. There is a good number of skilled immigrants that are very good for the economy. You are just trolling by stereotyping all of them as parasitic.
With respect to your can't be bothered to learn the language" comment which I'm sure will have a number of US citizens nodding their heads vigorously in agreement.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/national_language.jpg
How often did the British colonials learn local languages?
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
I have read TFA, and the linked study.
Dear God, if this is what passes for research at prestigious places like Berkeley these days, I am not surprised that immigrants outperform U.S.-born citizens
And that's just two examples. I am at a loss for words to see such stupidity even get past a professor's review.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Most people lack the initiative to depart from a situation that's familiar, but goes nowhere, to go somewhere that has opportunity and the risk of the unknown. The immigrants that come to America are thus self-selecting for initiative. Since getting here is also challenging, the filter also includes risk-taking, resourcefulness and determination.
Contrast this with some Americans' idiot nephews who are determined to avoid doing anything useful, or leaving home, ever. Unless you can get them drunk and wheelchair them into the Army recruiter's office, there's no getting rid of them.
So for those of you abroad who can read this, come on over to the US. We could use your initiative.
Oh, but don't come to my neighborhood. Very bad here, and we're full.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"capitol" != "capital". Though in this case, both are relevant.
Monstar L
It's stupider than patents. I have several friends caught up in this crap, and it is bad for everyone. Let me explain how the H1B forces down wages for American workers (who it was supposed to protect): once you get an H1B person over here they are pretty much locked in their job, so the company can massivly underpay them, which makes American born workers even less desirable. If the H1B's had job mobility, they might come in on the cheap (like college kids do anyways), but they'd job-hop and be sucked into American consumerism and they'd demand more and wages would go up for everyone. Well, everyone who can do a decent job.
And that's just it -- the entire immigration debate (from the high-tech workers to strawberry pickers) is simply an effort to protect our lazy and/or stupid people at the expense of everyone else in the country and the world. Worried about there being too many people who come to take advantage of the system? And what controls are there for keeping US citizens from popping out more babies than they or the government can take care of? None. At least most of the immigrants want to work. The immigration debate is a thinly veiled double standard that has it's roots in racism and fear of legitimate competition.
Even with the illegal strawberry pickers, the fact that we don't give them legal status forces them to make shady deals with their employers, which in turn allows the employers to pay them less and refuse them benefits they'd have to pay for legal workers. Who suffers? Not just the illegal immigrants -- but also the citizens since they can't reasonably compete with what amounts to slave labor. Every attempt at protecting ourselves backfires.
And don't just say we need to increase security. That just does not work. We can't get security in Iraq even having the country overrun by military. Force can not stop a people who truly believe their life is only worth living if they violate the laws of that force. And even if it were possible to succeed in that endeavor... what? We get the honor of being like all the lousy countries who have fought to close their borders over the years? Name them for me... not a prestigious list. Rather, we should be finding ways to make the most of the reality that people want to come here, take advantage (in the positive sense of the word) of the people who want to be a part of America. Stop trying to change, outlaw, or discourage them. They are customers of the American lifestyle and economy.
Here's a vague starting point: make the rule that anyone who wasn't a convicted felon in their country could come here for 3 months. If they could find a job and stay off the streets during that time, they (and their dependents) could stay as long as they were working somewhere. After 5 years, they'd be citizens. That would give them the motivation to become a group we can appreciate, perhaps even better than your average natural born American.
Cheers.
Everyone who wants tighter border controls is the decendant of someone who immigrated to this country before there were border controls. Think about that. If you want those tighter controls, tell me which country you'd have liked your family to have been stuck in, where you'd be living today.
Fact is, this country is wholly built by immigrants. Get used to it.
Cheers.
nearly a quarter of all California startups which went into business between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant as a founding member.
Being that California's population is more than a quarter non-native born, this statistic does not mean much.
Table-ized A.I.
So what? Who cares? Lets break down the numbers...
Foreign run high-tech startups contributed $52 billion to the economy in 2005
- Not really, startups where at least one person was foreign born contributed this much.
- In a 12.49 trillion dollar economy, $52 billion is about %0.4
- Americans spent about that much on shoes last year, or lawn care
These companies employed 450,000 people
- 0.3% of the work force producing %0.4 of GDP
- That's great until you realize that these are 450,000 high tech workers who should be producing many magnitudes more GDP than the average. A semiconductor worker != a dish washer.
Yet, for some reason, both the article and study draw the conclusion that they've uncovered something significant. As far as I can tell, they've uncovered the fact that nothing significant exists in this data in any way.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of foreigners coming to the US and starting businesses. Its a big middle finger to their home countries who never implemented the financial and legal systems necessary to allow business to flourish. One of our family friends is from Iran. He decided that the ruling system there was screwed beyond fixing, escaped for American, and is now a self made millionaire. Brilliant!
But, I'm not for collecting a bunch of completely average statistics, pointing to them and exclaiming: Incredible!
Really? I came to the UK with a VC funded company I co-founded. We brought with us 20 people, all of who paid tax. We employed 30 more for a while. The company had to scale back a few years ago, but every single one of the people who left found other high paid jobs and are helping to fund UK. I currently work for another startup and pay almost as much in tax every year as the average UK person earn. Over the last year I was also offered another position in another UK startup, VC funded and again started by two immigrants. For that matter, most of the local businesses where I live in South London were started and and are run by immigrants. Relying on anecdotal evidence will invariably give us biased viewpoints.
But, as I've found out, apparently my experiences in the matter "doesn't really count" because I'm white, from Europe (Norway to be precise), and not muslim. Conveniently, people complaining about immigration almost invariably find ways to redefine the "immigrants" to mean "low paid poor people that look different from us" - I hope you're not one of the people stooping that low.
They take priority over British citizens, because they are a 'minority'.
Really? Can you cite proof, please?
In fact, people who arrive in the UK without a proper work permit, visa or right to work (as a EU/EEA member state citizen for instance) risk being put in detention centers. Of the ones that don't, most are hard working and pay their taxes.
Ever noticed how most parking attendants in the UK are black? Turns out almost the only people prepared to take the level of abuse a parking attendant gets are Nigerian immigrants. Similar situations are found in many other professions that "native" British people just don't want to take, or aren't performing well.
Notice how Polish immigrants are changing the UK building industry? It's because British builders are shit - they overcharge, don't show up on time, and do an overall crappy job, while the Polish and other builders that come here do their jobs well and deliver on time. In fact, given the choice between hiring a British builder and a Polish builder, I'd likely pick the Polish guy even if I had to pay more. I have used a couple of skilled British builders, but they're the exception rather than the rule, and even the skilled ones tend not to understand the concept of delivering to an agreed timeframe.
Notice how nurses in the UK are often African or South Asian? In fact, this is one of the areas where immigration to the UK IS a problem, though not to the UK - the UK is sucking many developing nations dry of skilled workers, especially in the health field.
Immigrants cost me a fortune in tax. And they can't be bothered to learn the language, so now street signs in London can even be seen in Arabic!
Actually, immigrants save you a fortune in tax. It costs the UK far less to import skilled labour than paying child benefit, health care, school and university costs for a child born here and loose the tax revenues from the mother during maternity leave etc., and the immigrants that do come here to work far outnumbers the few that end up on benefits. Immigration is a net economic benefit to most industrialized countries that have reasonable unemployment rates.
The main issue with immigration is that in some professions it's "reverse aid" from developing nations to the developed nations.
And if you even think of bringing up citizens of poorer EU/EEA states, keep in mind that they are required to pay for themselves or leave unless they've been working in the UK for four years and apply for indefinite leave to remain (i.e. even though I've worked here for 6 years, if I become unable to pay my way myself, I could get throw straight out despite having paid around GBP 150k in taxes and n
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.
These studies are used by the WSJ and others to promote increases in the quotas for H-1B visas. But the foreigners with the H-1B visas are not the ones starting companies. The H-1B visas are mainly used by big companies to cut their labor costs, and get employees who will not leave to join start-up companies.
The US is currently suffering from less then 5% unemployment. When you have under 5% unemployment it means that you have a labor shortage. The only things corporations, especially ones that work at the fringes of profitability, can do is hire illegals or go out of business. We have a finite amount of labor in this nation. Once it is used up, it is gone. If a farm needs 300 people do manual labor and can't get them without offering enough money to put them out of business, then it goes out of business. Now, I am all for businesses going out of business, but not when there is an ample supply of people willing to work just across the border. Little is gained when a corporation goes out of business in a full employment market. Cutting off immigration just murders a pile of US industries that are out merrily providing us with cheap goods and services.
Don't get me wrong, I am against illegal immigration. However, the solution is not build better fences or waste billions of dollars trying to root out every single smuggler and forcing people into more dangerous methods of crossing. The solution is to make it so that a poor Mexican who will happily work for close to minimum wage in some marginal industry can legally cross. We want to know these people are here. Want to run background checks and make them come in through legal points of entry. So long as our immigration system is so badly fucked up where it takes a decade a pile of money to get across, people are going to illegally immigrate.
As much as I hate a lot of what Bush does, he had a damn good immigration plan that the Republican congress (and a few Dems) murdered. He opened up legal ways for guest workers and immigrants to come here. Allowing legal crossing would have shut down smugglers, saved lives, and resulted in collecting tax money, better health and safety oversight, and all the benefits you receive when workers work legally.
Black markets (even in labor) create crime, poverty, and misery. The only way to bring down a black market is to legalize and regulate the market. This is what we need to do with immigration.
The demographics in the US are getting much older. We've seen no net new workers in the 25-64(?) range SINCE 2000.
That means people are aging out or dying as fast as new ones come in. It's only going to get worse.
We must have an influx of workers in the future to do things like run our shops, keep services running, etc.
If we don't, there will be no tax base to pay for medical care for the elderly, etc.
Never mind that we will have to import doctors and other very educated types, since there will definitely be a shortage of geriatricians, etc.
Look at France and Germany, they're already having to import workers. Which is why we're seeing more stories about ethnic conflict, racism, and the return of fascism.
But it has to happen.
The difference between legal immigration, and illegal immigration is roughly the same as the difference between shopping and shop-lifting.
Lumping legal immigration with illegal immigration is like lumping shoppers and shop-lifters together and saying we should not prosecute shop-lifters because stores need the business.
You appear to have lost track of what the United States is here for. Let me give you a reminder, starting with a few things it's not.
It's not here to guarantee you a bigger car than the guy in the next country over.
It's not here to guarantee you a job.
It's not here to let you tell other people how to spend their money.
It's not here to compete with other countries.
It's not here to put you in a master class based on which side of some line on a fucking map you were born on.
It's here to give people a place to do as they will, and to give everybody a chance to compete with one another, if they so choose, on a level playing field. It's here to give them that because they deserve it, because they're people, not because of where they're from or who their parents were.
The United States is an instrument created for a purpose. Insofar as it has lost track of that purpose, it is not worthy of the loyalty of any human being... and even if it follows that purpose, the true loyalty ought to be to the purpose, not the country... and sure as hell not to every fuckwit with an inflated sense of entitlement who happens to have been born within its borders.
You nativist idiots, the my-country-right-or-wrong assholes, the xenophobic safety-obsessed cowards, and all the other lame excuses for Americans who seem to run the joint these days, are a disgrace to the principles the USA used to think it stood for.
You make me sick.
What you are saying does not match up to practice. Most the immigrants that came to America came in waves, in large waves, and we handled it. After WW2, the tiny area of Hong Kong was literally flooded with poor people, more people, and lots of people - and they not only handled it, they thrived. People are not burdens. Your lifeboat analogy implies that every time one comes in, that it ads more harmful pressure on the system. Well, I'll give that it does to the welfare state, and all the other freebies that the government hands out coerced at other peoples expense. So what, those kinds of programs need to die anyhow.
When a poor person comes to the US and takes advantage of our having more freedom to create wealth and opportunity that never existed before - that benefits us, it benefits them, and it benefits the world. That we should tell them "well, get in line and wait and starve while we process a bunch of formalities that takes 5 years to complete" is bullshit. Isn't the whole point of a free country that peoples liberties shouldn't revolve around the permissions of those that govern?
Mexico happens to have universal health care coverage. It might not be perfect, but then neither is the pharma-medial-legal complex that impoverishes anyone who happens to enter a US hospital without comprehensive insurance. See:
- 4.asp
http://www.cfpc.ca/cfp/2005/Jan/vol51-jan-letters
http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-9421-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html
Most immigrants are not here to take advantage of the US health care "system" such as it is (any sensible person would much prefer taking advantage of Cuba's). Most immigrant are here because the US economic system affords opportunities at all levels of skill that are far superior to those available in other countries.
I have yet to meet a US immigrant who considers health care a factor in their decision to move. Any thinking person to whom that mattered would move to Canada.
-- Equity lord of the Trill Consortium