But in general it is the rise of anti-immigration sentiment, and the instability with respect to immigration.
There's the case of green cards for Indians and the Chinese. Under the current system, Indians and Chinese workers who start the process of getting a green card today must wait at least 13 years to get it. The prospect of working under a temporary visa for the best years of your life, always under the shadow of a change in administration or policy that uproots you and sends you back to your place of birth is likely to deter a lot of people, and might tempt them to move to Europe or Canada instead.
This is a lose-lose situation because these people don't get to work at the cutting edge of tech, and also the companies that desperately need bright minds lose out on them because they sensibly decided not to risk the US's broken immigration system.
This wasn't always the case, by the way. It's a pretty recent development over the last few years. Since green cards are allotted by place of birth and are a fixed number for every country, it is far easier for a person from Afghanistan to become a permanent resident than for an Indian.
I guess that makes sense. If you have a low opinion of Trump starting out, then hearing about his upcoming "immigration reform" is like the Pointy-Haired Boss telling you not to worry about that race condition in the billing server because he "fixed" it: It just makes you more worried.
> Under the current system, Indians and Chinese workers who start the process of getting a green card today must wait at least 13 years to get it.
That sounds terrible. Would plans to make the requirements more strict(such as requiring them to work a high-paying job, or sorting them by the salary of the sponsoring employer) help alleviate this, since the queue will be shorter?
If it does, the effects will only be seen in a couple of decades. A lot things can change by then. What would be better would a system where countries get green cards proportional to their population. It makes no sense for Fiji to be awarded the same number as India.
That makes sense, since it's reasonable to assume that high-quality employees are a percentage of the population.
Having a global fixed number of immigrants rather than a per-country pool would also work: If A has a population of 10, B has a population of 20(with similar quality percentage), and the pool is 6, then A gets 1/2 the amount admitted as B. If A's population rises to 20, then they'd get the same amount as B. So it would be proportional to population within the pool.
The only reason to prefer per-country fixed limits is if you wanted diversity. The meaning of "diversity" here is approximated by "variance of sampling immigrants' original home government from a uniform distribution over all governments".
There is already a separate 50k green cards set aside for "diversity lottery", so that concern should not affect the desire to remove per-country caps for skilled immigration green cards.
> They’re looking for the LeBrons and Bradys — the best people in the world
"High-quality" means "would pass an interview at a top tech company that your typical US mediocre programmer or CS graduate would fail", or perhaps "could work as a senior executive at a top tech company". The article is presenting an argument that hiring at tech companies would be affected; humanitarian concerns are irrelevant to that argument.
Only in that the political backlash was unexpected, forcing the Administration to backpedal.
* H1B wage increase: I heard a rumor somewhere that they were thinking about raising the minimum wage for either H1B visas or NAFTA jobs to $130k. That shouldn't affect the Googles and Apples of the world at all; if anything, it benefits them because it frees the slots the cheap H1B outsourcing firms are taking up, or removes competition from low-paying startups.
* Increased enforcement against illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico. The "best of the best" that the article claims the tech industry wants should be able to get employees under NAFTA; I know people from Canada who do this already. So any policies targeted at illegal immigration shouldn't be relevant.
* Muslim ban: The green card/visa issues have other arguments against them. One could plausibly say that not honoring those legal documents makes hiring foreigners riskier. As for the actual people themselves though, 6 of those 7 countries we're currently at war with. Maybe not officially or directly, but we've been dropping bombs on those countries for years so they seem a special case. Is the article claiming that Google is expecting top-of-the-line MIT-quality software people from war-torn Syria? I know Israel has some pretty high-quality people; are there other places in the Middle-East(maybe Dubai)?
Is there any specific policy that people are worried will hurt hiring at tech companies, or is it just a general uneasiness about anti-immigration sentiment?