This will be a deal-breaker for over 95% of the applicants. Even though the H1B Visa is a non-immigrant visa, there was no such clause attached to it like this one.
It's what enables 1000s of immigrants (like me) every year to first arrive on a non-immigrant visa and then get the employer to petition their green cards for permanent stay or eventually citizenship. I personally know many immigrants who didn't really want to become citizens and intended to go back to their home country in 5 to 10 years timeframe, but applied for and obtained permanent residency (green card) just so that this uncertainty of resident status is eliminated.
Take that (the green card) away, why would any entrepreneur be incentivized to apply for this Visa? Because 2 or 3 * years is a very short time frame to create and run a successful startup. Why would any entrepreneur risk coming here on a temporary stay only to be banished just as the startup takes off?
* 3 = Number of years Kevin O'Leary (Shark Tank) says you give your startup to turn profitable before taking it to the back of the Barn and shooting it.
We might actually have to start investing equally in US children of all socioeconomic classes to ensure we have enough entrepreneurs and bright minds to compete in the global economy.
EDIT: WOW, didn't think such an obvious comment would be so controversial (points are swinging up and down cyclically).
Do ya'll think we are extremely efficient at turning potential into value from all of our current citizens? Do you NOT want to do anything but fail if Trump severely fucks up immigration and our economy?
Or does it hurt your feelings to think that everything you've achieved in life wasn't 100% through your own hard work?
I'm confused.
And this problem with our schools existed long before trump, and not to sound conspiritorial, but the both GOP and neoliberals like Hillary both seem to have interests in keeping public schools underperforming.
And it isn't a funding problem, either. We spend more per capita on education than most, if not all, other countries.
Median teacher salary in the US public schools = $57,200. And 50.4 million students attend public elementary and secondary schools combine. Teacher student ratio is nominally 16.1 so ~3.5k* per student. However, the total spending per student is actually ~$12.7k core and 15.5k w/ indirect support.
This gap covers support staff, buildings, equipment, trips, testing, etc but most other school systems do that stuff for far less money. https://www.oecd.org/edu/EAG2014-Indicator%20B1%20(eng).pdf has PPP numbers for this stuff. But, it assumes each country is using the same metrics.
*Note that's just salary benefits get complicated to calculate.
Especially when the system seems to be so ... dysfunctional. I don't know a single teacher who hasn't had to personally shell out money for school supplies for their students because their school ran out of paper or something else essential.
Update: I misunderstood Retric. Teacher salaries make up 22% of total education spending. I guess that's ... better?
The cost of buildings, the maintenance, insurance, water, electricity all add up very quickly. Associated staff costs aren't cheap either - many schools have a nurse on staff to deal with injuries and illness, for example. Counselors/psychologists help troubled students. Learning specialists help deal with certain problems - as an example, when I was in kindergarten I was sent to a speech therapist a couple of times a week. Teaching assistants help care for the more severely disabled - some of them basically have a dedicated assistant based on their disability.
Buses aren't cheap either, and in rural areas, you might need several smaller buses to get everyone to school in a reasonable amount of time.
Schools in more urban areas often have security guards, and most schools have put more money into physical security as well with the perceived rise in school shootings (not trying to start a debate as to whether or not this is happening).
Administrators and secretaries plan and organize everything that isn't directly related to teaching, handle some disciplinary issues, and interface with other government agencies, the school board, and the board of education at the state and sometimes even federal level.
Education is expensive, and you can't start cutting out pieces of this without very quickly impacting the students.
This honestly applies to many areas of government, not just education. However, for right wing propaganda, it serves as a convenient boogy man to ram through tax cuts for the wealthy.
Cops and school nurses may come out of the 'school' budget line item but they are very much health care and policing spending. If another country has that same nurse, but takes it out of their public healthcare budget then their 'education' spending numbers will be significantly lower without lowering their total government spending.
Similarly if free universal healthcare is part of the national budget then the reported costs for every worker in the school system will be several hundred a month lower. Even though government spending is similar.
Not sure if anyone does this. But, another example is school buses could just as easily come out of the public transit expenses as the school budget. The distinction is rather arbitrary as you are moving people even if you are taking them to school.
PS: Net result we might be spending more or less money because your comparing relatively arbitrary budget numbers across different systems. Much like the US taking the prison budget to cover for the lack of a well functioning healthcare system for the mentally ill.
So... have them take the regular buses? Seems incredibly wasteful to try to fill one bus with school children when those areas are (or should be!) covered by the regular bus routes.
> Schools in more urban areas often have security guards, and most schools have put more money into physical security as well with the perceived rise in school shootings (not trying to start a debate as to whether or not this is happening).
WTF?
Regarding security, I can use the high school I went to as an example. When I went there, it was a very open campus, and fences were only used around the athletics fields, and were more to stop balls from heading into the street. During expansions and renovations, however, they built additional buildings around the edges of campus to act as barriers, and added more fencing, leaving only about 3 entrances to the grounds that were more easily monitored. This was despite the fact that it was a very safe area with low crime. I personally don't like it, but I suppose it's an easy way for schools to show that they're trying to make it harder for things to happen.
I just mean there is a sliding scale where you can include a school nurse as education spending or healthcare spending and countries don't always slice stuff the same way. Is reduced cost lunches welfare or education, how about subsidized school supplies?
Now, you might be ok with a broader geographical distribution of this type of talent, or argue that it will happen eventually no matter what. I hear you, on both counts. But, as a non-U.S. citizen, I am actually pretty surprised that the country would chose to forgo the advantage it enjoys by being a preferred immigration destination for so many skilled people...
It also seems to be done due to nothing but rank xenophobia. I mean, what is the excuse here? "They are stealing our jobs!"? This is literally a visa where the requirement is to create jobs for American citizens, and most of these tech firms will do so by exporting goods mostly to foreign markets (the market for most tech startups is not over 50% local to the U.S.) and/or creating local technology and expertise. Hell, once profitable, you can and should tax these companies to help provide for that very same education you want for American citizens! As well as UBI for those whose jobs are being displaced by automation. Startup visas are as win-win as it possibly gets.
Final point: The party and particular administration that seems to be most against immigration also seems to be the one most against science or robust public education. The foreseeable end result is grim, even if these policies last only 4 years: a "lost half-decade" in which the best domestic talent is under-nourished and the best foreign talent goes elsewhere.
There is only a small subset that seems to just be bigoted. And, yes, they do exist. I am pretty sure they are low in number. Most of the complaints are about things like body shops but there have even been complaints involving Disney.
Maybe I'm wrong, but if you can train your replacement, we probably didn't need a replacement. It's not like they move them up the ladder. They lay them off and pay the people with visas very little money, comparatively.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think, if true, they have a legitimate complaint. Most of them seem to agree that it should be bringing in experts and not lower paid people that need to be trained by the people they are replacing.
So, what do you think? Would you agree that there are legitimate concerns? Many of these complaints do not, to me, appear xenophobic or racist.
Better worker protections.
Stopping immigration doesn't stop you from having to train your replacement, they'll just be American instead. Making companies have to treat their workers with a bit of civility will solve a lot of problems.
In this specific case, and depth in the comment tree, there have been 2 incorrect assertions made, the clarification of which leads to the truth.
The first is - maybe now america will invest in its own talent
the second is - many times people are being told to train their own replacement
The issue is that job distribution is bi-modal in tech.
Theres a cluster at the very high end (jobs as a google scientist), and theres a cluster at the lower end (guys maintaining web pages).
The talent people compete for around the world is for the top end of the curve - and america has been sucking these people away from their home country for ages.
Furthermore - I have seen American talent in American colleges, you do a very good job of converting people into smart people.
This process has only recently been corrupted because of the poor job scenario for the lower and middle ends of the job curve. But its still damn good.
Closing those doors, after the rank xenophobia being displayed by the Administration means you lose out on the part of the curve you want to be competitive on.
To be clear, I'm not sure my question even really has an answer. I understand the need to attract top talent. If we don't, they are just going to go to work somewhere else.
At the same time, do we really want to replace local talent with not as talented, but less expensive, people? There are some big implications there and I have seen reasoned arguments to support doing so. It hits very strongly on the concept of what duties the government has to its citizens and to the rest of humanity who are not citizens.
I really don't know. I don't have a solution. I can do your math homework, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to realistically determine the answers to these questions.
I suspect that nobody would listen, even if I did have the answers. Ah well...
This is a false dichotomy. These people could be just as skilled, if not more. So then your only argument is localism.
Also, if we _let immigrants compete in the labor market properly_ by not handcuffing people like H-1Bs to their company.... they won't be cheaper. They could just get poached by another company or take a job at market rates.
1) This is a particular case where making immigration difficult to the people involved directly results in less jobs for Americans, as observed above. Yet that's still what is being done. It is clear from it that, for some people, the desire to reduce immigration is not just related to job security. This doesn't mean there aren't legitimate concerns, just that it doesn't seem to me that the explicit legitimate concerns are the only issue here.
2) The particular cohort of H1-B developers I am more familiar with compete with American grads for equal jobs and equal salary/RSUs, and are nobody's 'cheaper replacement'. Now, I am not saying that what you describe doesn't happen. But you know what would help there? Making it easier for people in H1-B's to change employers or even stay unemployed (even on their own money, without benefits) for a few months in the U.S. searching for a job if their employer is exploitative!
There is a sort of issue 2.1. here that I will acknowledge: yes, having more skilled people come in increases supply and lowers prices for labor, slightly. But most of the jobs in question are at companies that target a global market, this means not making use of a global labor pool is both ideologically suspect and a bad long term plan. Talented people in other places will still compete with you, and now you don't even get their taxes or the effect their talent creates in the available job opportunities in your area. If, say, you keep all the Amazon jobs for Americans but end up buying all your stuff from Alibaba the world over, was that a good outcome for you?
> > This is literally a visa where the requirement is to create jobs for American citizens
is this?
> The complaints that I read are often that they aren't actually jobs that couldn't be fulfilled here, with local talent
I don't expect that to change in any meaningful way. I would say there are no reasons to expect any different. I'd not be surprised to see Company X 'invest' a certain amount in someone just to get a cheaper person here and then get their investment money back, probably with interest, while paying the imported labor very poorly.
Hell, it'd probably be even less expensive because said company will just use said startup as a contractor. I have no reason to suspect they will doing any additional oversight or enforcement.
If your fear is being replaced by someone who is ready to work for less. There are enough kids who will do anything for a job, including taking a good pay cut. To replace you.
The real issue you must be worried about being relevant to the work you are doing. Being productive, resourceful and keeping your skills up to date. And yes never putting yourself in a situation where you think some particular work is beneath your station.
However, I would suggest that we have a moral obligation to avoid sinking as low as we possibly can. Yes, if people are hungry, they will work for pennies on the dollar.
Ethically, I would suggest we avoid desperate people en masse, for a whole mess of reasons. Hell, I can make a financial argument that suggests we not do that. You get better work from content people who have the means to consume.
I guess it's more a thought exercise. It's probably up to us, as individuals, to do the right things. We don't really have much history of doing so, collectively. Buggered if I have the answers.
But in talking of these, I see it more akin to the way Open Source software is up front and public about it - with the idea that enough eyeballs, these problems can be worked with. Being able to even frame the question, with politically charged areas like this, is a step in the right direction.
And no single person is expected to figure it out. But a thousand of us could.
The problems we have in America are the same if not much worse in most of the world (except for Europe, I imagine). What % of children in China and India do not have access to decent education or opportunities? I think it's pretty high.
My thought process was inspired by the recent article on the estimated 5 million geniuses in India, most of which will go on to lead lives in poverty.
The 5 million number is vastly exaggerated if you go for a real meaning of the word 'genius'. For example, Einstein's IQ is reportedly 160 and assuming normal distribution that is about 1 in 32,000. Even if everyone in India receives the same opportunities as Einstein did from their childhood, the number would be 1.34 billion/32,000 = 42,000.
Not to mention that IQ alone is far from adequate. Imagination, persistence, and courage are required for intellectual distinction. That's why there are so few accomplished geniuses in the world.
No. Or rather we are doing it badly. But we don't do any better if we geographically segregate people who otherwise might want to work together. It is an orthogonal (albeit incredibly important) problem. As I said, all of our countries should be investing more in education, in addition to having humane and sensible immigration policies and a reasonable social safety net. But in any case, there are more skilled people in the whole world right now than in the U.S. alone, by construction...
but it seems like the us has it made right now, a substantial amount of talent from overseas and abysmal investment in the native populace.
if you want to keep underinvesting in education, and keep a strong presence in new technologies/science/commerce...why would you turn off the magic spigot?
even if you started trying to right the ship of education, there's no way you could compensate for the talent thats coming in across the border, particularly in the short term.
Yes, that's absolutely true. I'm not much of an expert in that policy area, although it does seem the Bureau of Indian Affairs isn't working out well in some ways.
There's a lot of implicit assumptions in your original comment, and immigration policy is a politically extremely loaded subject, so people are almost inevitably going to project additional inferences onto your remarks inssofar as they seem to resemble well-known political arguments.
Who is we?
The E2 visa is a non immigration visa and you must demonstrate your intent to not immigrate to the United States. Given this, the non immigration tenet of this startup visa is a non-issue.
Except you have 20% chance of getting the H1B when applying.
A vast majority of us (H1B visa applicants and holders) don't believe we are special or that there is a severe shortage of skilled tech workers. Most of us were/are aware that this Visa is abused and it's just a way for Companies in both countries to hire cheap labor and exploit us.
Just that it's the easiest LEGAL way for educated engineers to arrive at -- and later immigrate into -- the United States.
When I came on the H1b visa, I was making 40% less than my American co-worker (we dated briefly, that's how I came to know of her compensation) for the same exact Job Title, Job Description and Primary Job Duties. My Indian "bodyshopper" (that's what the companies that petition H1bs are called in India) refused to give me a raise for 2 years, despite my American manager raving about my performance and telling them to keep me "happy".
Because the other "caveat" with the employer-based immigration in the United States is that if you lose your job, then your Green Card / Permanent residency application goes back to the very beginning with your new employer. So you can potentially lose years of time on the green card processing if you 1) get laid off or 2) you get fired.
Everybody knows this, so they kept us suppressed on the low wages. It's a sort of rite-of-passage. Every Indian, Pakistani and Chinese immigrant I know has gone through this.
There are numerous countries that fit this profile. The majority of Central/Eastern Europe, few Asian and South American countries, even with Africa having some. Instead, they expect for people from developed countries go through the nightmare of getting a visa, being screened and then live in places like Cali where cost of living is ridiculous. US could easily give out 1 Mil easy-to-get visas with easy-to-get transition program to a green card that would bump their economy, instead, they are creating walls everywhere.
To me, it seems obvious that every financially successful (through merit or otherwise) and well educated person you can draw into your country, the better. If such a person makes your country home, the likely-hood of them contributing to the economy is high.
Despite this, emigrating to the US from Western Europe is extremely arduous. Either you are transferred via a multinational facing high competition for the place or you enter the lottery alongside others who won't necessarily contribute as much as you are able to.
The incentive for a nation such as the US seems perfectly apparent from the outside. Grab the best and brightest from countries with excellent education and similar cultural backgrounds in exchange for citizenship. When there is so much demand, why not? Seems to only be a win.
I cannot help but think that western nations have entered some sort of pact (as many SV companies did) in regards to non poaching. Each country wants to keep their best, so some agreement (formal or otherwise) is reached to prevent mass exodus to one.
The left wants to maximize multiculturalism. This has become a sort of fundamental value to that tribe (rather than a means to an end), and their fundamental anti-value is racism/xenophobia/intolerance of anyone not white-Christian. So that tribe will resist any hint of an attempt to selectively immigrating people from culturally or racially similar countries, because such immigration actually threatens to reduce multiculturalism, which to them is a fundamentally evil thing. So they'd call it racist.
In addition, even just choosing people for wealth or intelligence or English skills, you'd end up with a big cultural/racial skew towards white people (compared to the world population), so the left would call it racist for the same reasons.
Those on the right might be happy with such immigration, but it's too difficult of an argument to make and it's too easy for the left to call them racists if they suggest anything like it. So as a proxy, they tend to argue for reducing all immigration.
I must be missing a lot of the details but I think it's some sort of political compromise/deadlock like this.
You can reverse engineer the government's motivation by looking at the policies it seeks to introduce and asking your self what worldview would motivate such policies. There's a nice little ML project.
Democrats like all immigration, refuse to go ahead with high skill only immigration reform unless republican compromise
The end result is deadlock.
I'm a Democrat. I don't like all immigration. With some quibbles, I'm mostly behind long existing rules barring certain “bad people” from immigrating.
OTOH, I think hard caps are bad ways of dealing with the social costs of high quantities of immigration of people that aren't excluded, and it would be better to assess direct fees for people who wanted to immigrate beyond the caps (or without a preference category but who aren't personally barred for bad conduct, etc.) And it would be better, in existing preference categories with caps, to align allocation per-country with demand (or just abandon specific per-country allocations altogether and just a use a global limits) so we don't have a handful of countries with very long waits for legal immigration in various categories due to per country, rather than in-total, caps.
I also have issues with the priorities (both positive and negative) implicit in some bits of the existing structure of immigrant and non-immigrant visa categories, but that's kind of secondary.
Well, that will surely make america bigly again.
It's about supply and demand.
If you supply labor at X skill level, an influx of immigrants at X skill level (but not of Y or Z skill level) will reduce the buying power of your wages.
Taking it to real life - people tend to oppose immigration when they are at X skill level, and support it when they are at Y or Z skill level. It's raw self-interest often dressed up as altruism or principle.
You can see this understanding here whenever H1B is discussed - suddenly supply and demand becomes an obvious economic concept.
And often they're in they're twenties, meaning society didn't have to pay for the expensive first two decades of growing up. Basically a live is 8 decades, 4 decades of which are unproductive, and 4 decades are productive. If you get an immigrant, you get a 6 decades person that's unproductive for only 2 decades -- and some other society paid for those 2 other unproductive decades.
Median age for all Americans is 36.
Sources:
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-...
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/chapter-5-u-s-foreign-...
And indeed, when you remove most of the population who are younger than twenty, the medium age of the group overall will increase.
Sheesh! Next thing you know you'll be asking to price petroleum in something other than USD or something!
As a French cofounder of a small startup: no. We are looking at making a structure in Canada in order to hunt US money. We assume that immigration in the US will be a nightmare and we have tons of other problems to solve. European funds and Chinese investors are also interested in our tech.
Actually, we should explore if US talents are not willing to move out, to France or Canada instead.
Why? What's wrong with the current level?
It's incredible what is happening. It's like watching a slow moving train wreck and there is nothing we can do to stop it. :/
I think it's possible to be a superpower and maintain America's identity while also having the population be as happy as that of Sweden's. That's how I view(ed) the country heading during the 2008-2016 years. Maybe I'm naive but I was seeing a lot of social issues change for the better. We were working towards gay rights. There were discussions around discrimination and racism. We were also bringing a lot more attention to the healthcare issues we have here. There's a trend around being healthy and educated. There was even talk about wages, work/life balance, and the cost of living. I figured things would improve as these discussions began to get louder and take up more of the country's focus.
My views are starting to get a lot more cynical nowadays. I wouldn't mind if the U.S. just turtled and gave up on the dream of being the best. Is it silly to want to be the best country on Earth? Do people from outside the U.S. share that same mentality or is it just some culturally-imposed ideal that the U.S. has?
I think the latter, the whole notion of "The Land of the Free" always feels more like aspirational marketing than something true, and real.
I'm from the UK, although these days I've moved to Finland for personal reasons. I'm proud of the UK, and proud to be from the UK, but at the same time we're a country that used to have an empire, and due to a variety of changes we lost it. Some of the things we did when gaining or maintaining that empire, were terrible, others were generally positive.
But either way I think the UK has largely given up on being a world-leader. In some fields they still have a big edge, in others they're falling behind. Either way I think it is fair to say there is no cohesive push for greatness, just different people/groups/fields individually doing what is best for them. (Which could be extrapolated to extremes, e.g. Brexit.)
That wasn't my impression at all. During that time, I lived and worked in Baltimore and Philly. The inner city poverty there was as bad as ever--indeed worse because those cities, like many parts of the country, are getting left behind in the "new economy." In my view, America has a culture problem, not a talent or technology problem. We're people who dish out life sentences for a string of non-capital crimes; in Germany (much less Sweden) the maximum for murder is 15 years. Our state and local mismanagement is more reminiscent of a third world country than a western democracy. Our local governments are insolvent, we're incapable of building infrastructure despite throwing tons of money at it. I just returned from visiting Tokyo. The trains there are so smooth and reliable that they were a revelation to me coming from D.C. Not only do we not have anything like that, I can't even picture how our incompetent governmental units would build something like that.
I'm sure I'm viewing things with rose colored glasses. Germany and Japan are significantly poorer countries than the US, after all. But they manage to get really basic aspects of their society right in a way the US seems culturally incapable of doing.
I think the best example was with gay marriage. I definitely saw how much opposition there was to that, but seeing a lot of the country get dragged into progress made me feel more hopeful. That's the feeling I had in general, about everything. "Here's where we have progress to make; we'll definitely drag along a good portion of the country into it, but we'll get there eventually." Now it seems like the trend is in the opposite direction, or that it'll take way longer than I thought to see any kind of real improvement. Even with the infrastructure you mentioned, it seems like there's a big push to keep things exactly as they are now.
Certainly wanting to be the "best" as defined by richest and strongest is limited to a tiny handful countries (Russia, US, China basically), but even Russia and China seem more willing to concede the many flaws in their county. Countries like Sweden on the other hand will happily concede that they'll never be the richest or strongest and so aim to be "best" along other dimensions like equality and social care. Then there are other countries again that would be more than happy to simply make into the next decade more or less in one piece.
The whole "We're number One!" attitude is pretty limited to the US (possibly because they're really the only country that could make a strong argument for actually being "number one").
I've never seen any observer come to that conclusion lately (other than those with transparent agendas). For an overall take considering all the data, not just one or two data points, consider Nate Silver's: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-making-...
> Perhaps the biggest change is that any chance of a Turkey joining the EU is dead. That seemed like a real possibility 5-8 years ago.
Erdogan's authoritarianism is a bit of a confounding factor here.
Do you think very high population density is more or less healthy for the individual? What about the effect on the environment?
What happens once the US has 1.4 billion people and global birth rates have stabilized so there is no one else to bring in?
Maintaining economic growth may be important but it is only one consideration. Bringing in the best foreign workers is a somewhat easy and temporary fix, which dissuades the US from investing in its own citizens.
How many citizens who are down and out would actually be able to contribute a whole lot more? Is the onus solely on them to compete with already educated foreigners?
It would be more less selfish and more sustainable to concentrate on nurturing a national culture of intellect, learning, creativity, entrepreneurship and cohesion within the US rather than supplementing our deficiencies with the best of other countries.
Usually negligible because we have data only for developing countries. There's still no case of a developed nation with 1b+ population.
1. China is of comparable size to the US and has a population of nearly 1.4 billion people [ OK ]
2. Wee need the best here if we plan on staying a global superpower [ Huh? What does this have to do with territory size and population? ]
3. It's like watching a slow moving train wreck and there is nothing we can do to stop it. :/ [ How does this follow from any of the above ? ]
To make an actual point, China is vastly over-populated, to the point that it had to take draconian popuation-control measures. The result of those measures is now that each generation must care for itself and the previous generations, each of which are roughly twice as populous.
China is a slow-moving train wreck that can't be stopped...
1. People contribute to the economy. More people means the economy grows faster.
2. Lots of people would come to USA if it was easier for them to do so.
Of course if you are China or other USA competitor, you want low USA immigration, so that people stay in your country, and grow your economy instead.
2. Hopefully (1) does
Our food production, public health services, infrastructure, and environment would be completely overwhelmed and the government would be helpless to stop it.
"Within reason" is unreasonable to me. You're just saying "increase immigration it'll be good". What if it isn't? Your argument largely centers around more immigrants == better economy, but that's assuming we actually will have jobs for them, and that they don't get stuck in cultural ghettos and then turn to crime or radicalization. A society that is not culturally homogenous is not a very strong one.
Instead of taking in all these people, we should make where they live not a miserable place to live. I enjoy the population density we have in the United States. I have 0 interest in accelerating our population levels.
Or maybe I should. Since I own property I'll just get rich off of it. Hmmm.
There is nothing wrong with immigration or immigrants per se, but we really need to be careful with the rhetoric and think through our immigration policy and how it affects us at home, and how it affects those around the world.
10 years of 10x immigration would be 100,000,000 people, so about 11 cities the size of New York of 100% new immigrants. Such masses could not possibly assimilate to any significant degree; they'd obviously form huge enclaves.
Presumably you'd want to live amongst them, and you would not preferentially move to a neighborhood of people with your culture and upbringing and language. Fair enough.
My question is, instead of bringing them to America, why don't you just go to them? You could move to Brazil. Or India. These places are incredibly diverse. You could do it this year and you'd have your desired result immediately.
You're obviously not attached to anything about American people or culture, so what keeps you here?
When I went to college it was 30% asian, and they didn't bite either. There were brown kids and black kids, and many foreigners.
I don't think what makes America special is country of origin or the appearance of the people who live here. A lot of anti-immigration sentiment has undertones (or overtones) of xenophobia. This is understandable--foreigners are weird and unknown, and some parts of America are 95%+ white with few/no immigrants, or only European immigrants.
> 10 years of 10x immigration would be 100,000,000 people, so about 11 cities the size of New York of 100% new immigrants. Such masses could not possibly assimilate to any significant degree; they'd obviously form huge enclaves.
Ok, maybe 10x is too much, maybe the number should be more like 5x. This would require some sane policy from state and local governments. In the Bay Area, where I live, this would mean substantially increasing housing stock and density. It may mean other things for other localities. Maybe there are limits based on income level. But the target should be, if someone wants to come here and make a better life for themselves, they should be able to.
If someone is willing to leave their country and move to America, we can make it work and it can be a win-win for both sides.
There has to be equilibrium or it's a policy that will drive down worker wages, increase the wealth of the 1%, and leave the United States crowded and poor.
>They don't bite.
I grew up in a class of around 50% children of immigrants. I'm aware that they don't bite.
But, it's nice of you to instantly assume that I'm a xenophobic person just because I question your policy ideas on immigration. Of course the person who wants 20x immigration would assume the same thing about you, and then you're in the left-wing purity spiral. So let's just leave off the insinuations of personal flaws, okay?
>the target should be, if someone wants to come here and make a better life for themselves, they should be able to.
Please, please watch this 6 minute TED-style talk on immigration numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE
Your basic goal of helping the world is good. But your convictions have completely disconnected you from the strictures of reality.
Your goal isn't coherent. If your target is 5x immigration, then you're not even close to your stated goal of accepting everyone who wants to come. 5x immigration would be about 5 million per year. Africa alone adds 30 million people per year via births over deaths. If 1/3 of those want to enter, then you haven't even absorbed most of the population growth of one continent, much less helped existing Africans, or anyone from anywhere else.
The entire Western world (USA, Canada, Australia, Europe) is about 15% of the world population. It is simply impossible that 15% of the people can save 85% of the people by absorbing them. Even if only, say, a third want to come, it's simply mean dissolving Western countries and leaving the third world without any help or guidance at all.
If your goal is to help people in other countries - which is a good goal - you need to start approaching it with solutions that can actually work. We have to help them grow where they're planted.
>If someone is willing to leave their country and move to America, we can make it work and it can be a win-win for both sides.
This is such a fairy tale. Not every person in the world shares your values. What if that person hates democracy and want to usher in a global theocracy?
India and China really need to get a handle on their burgeoning population.
Presumably, the investor has invested in a corporate entity organized in the United States and that the money has been used to pay employees such that there's some kind of structure that continues to exist in the U.S. with or without the founder. If you're the investor, and you're just writing a check to a guy who flew in with a startup visa and nothing else, then I, a U.S. Citizen, have quite a few startup ideas I'd like to discuss with you.
This statement's only value is political, and is irrelevant when it comes to the issue being discussed.
The French tech visa programme remedies the problems with US tech visa that the OP listed, raising the possibility that Macron at least understands the role of government in innovation and technology conducive to attracting talent.
Trump is simply clueless and willingly so about these matters, even when surrounded by advisers. Yet mentioning this is "political" (euphemism for "I'm offended").
Problem is, it's hard enough finding someone to hold my hand in NZ, let alone marriage in another country.
I had high hopes that Clinton would win and I'd have my dream realised. I guess, it was never meant to be.
"To qualify for the rule, entrepreneurs would have to meet high standards. A foreigner must demonstrate that he or she will contribute to economic growth or job creation and show that a reputable investor has put at least $250,000 into the company. Under this rule, they can stay in the U.S. for 30 months, with the possibility of a 30-month extension. They cannot apply for a green card during this period."
This sounds like a pretty lame visa. How are you supposed to build a startup if you only have 30 months to do so? Why would investors risk $250k if the founder may be deported in 30 months? What happens after the extension period?
I'm 100% in favor of increasing all immigration to the USA, but this visa doesn't sound like a good option at all. Is the USA really so appealing that talented entrepreneurs will jump through this many hoops to start their company here?