Slashdot Mirror
Paul Graham: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
An anonymous reader writes: Y Combinator's Paul Graham has posted an essay arguing in favor of relaxed immigration rules. His argument is straight-forward: with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. can only expect about 5% of great programmers to be born here. He says, "What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional. Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and interest in programming that is not merely the product of training."
Graham says even a dramatic boost to the training of programmers within the U.S. can't hope to match the resources available elsewhere. "We have the potential to ensure that the U.S. remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year. What a colossal mistake it would be to let that opportunity slip. It could easily be the defining mistake this generation of American politicians later become famous for."
Graham says even a dramatic boost to the training of programmers within the U.S. can't hope to match the resources available elsewhere. "We have the potential to ensure that the U.S. remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year. What a colossal mistake it would be to let that opportunity slip. It could easily be the defining mistake this generation of American politicians later become famous for."
Reduce taxes on the corporations. Limit outsourcing - ie - remove it. Remove H1B visas entirely.
Abandon taxing income entirely, move to an all sales tax basis. That includes stock purchases, taxing every purchase @ 5% every time a stock is purchased.
When someone buys stock options for any physical object (oil, gas, corn, soybeans, etc) the cost for purchasing has to include the cost to store and transport those goods.
Limit executive salaries (including stock options, bonuses, perks) to 10x the lowest paid employee. Make golden parachutes illegal. Persons can be on one and only one board of directors.
Executives, boards of directors, majority stock holders become legally responsible for any and all laws broken by the corporations during the times they hold those jobs / offices / stock.
Only allow data about Americans to be worked on within the confines of the United States, not even visual representations of the data can leave the country (ie - no remote desktops, citrix, vmware, etc).
Require that anyone hired in the U.S. to be a U.S. citizen, or someone applying for U.S. citizenship - if they leave the country before they attain citizenship, then all funds will be removed from the person.