America is fine with people immigrating legally - always has been. The perception that America doesn't have any talent is rather recent. The reason companies are started here is due to a number of factors, most importantly the lack of corruption (say compared to Italy), the legal system, and how the class system works. You can actually move up. It doesn't help that you can earn more on the higher end, too. Compare Swedes in US vs Swedes in Sweden. FB UK to FB USA.

>>You can actually move up.

What is the proof for it. Evidence shows that the US is one of the worst countries for 'moving up'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#/media/File:Th...

America has nearly half of the World's millionaires, and 2017 1.1 million NEW millionaires were created.

http://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/inde...

How does that demonstrate moving up? If you come from wealth you are also likely to become wealthy yourself. That's the opposite of moving up. A millionaire who has 2 children and gives them a million each has just made 2 more millionaires.

Moving up requires people from lower wealth backgrounds moving up and the evidence clearly demonstrates that the US is one of the western countries where this happens the least.

The linked document is new money, as in people who weren't millionaires previously. Since we're discussing startups, where would you consider the best place to be to create a business?

>Moving up requires people from lower wealth backgrounds moving up and the evidence clearly demonstrates that the US is one of the western countries where this happens the least. 1,000,000+ people annually immigrate. Clearly it's a terrible place for your family.

No the linked document looks at two things new wealth and new millionaires. The new millionaires are not necessarily just the ones from new wealth and there is no stipulation that they are self made millionaires so my previous point holds. The US is a great country for those that start out with wealth advantages but not so great for those that start out very low.

If you want to compare immigration figures as a measure of how great a place is then lets take the EU. The EU is roughly similar to the US in terms of GDP. In 2016 there was about 2,000,000+ immigrants from outside the EU to the EU suggesting that it's a more popular destination. If however we take a more realistic measure of net migration (migration as a percentage of population) then the US is 29th on the list behind many European countries but also such noticeably desired locations such as the UAE.

Migration are not a great measure of whether a country is a great place to move up through society.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

The EU is a series of countries, that's a moving goal post. Only Germany comes close to the US with immigration figures and the US is nearly triple their figures, and has ~40 million immigrants total, more than any European country not to mention that Europe as a whole is extremely racist compared to the US.

In your opinion which European country is best for startups?

Totally agree.

What's really going on is that Californian tech companies have a very hard time getting American talent from outside California to destroy their quality of living by relocating to California.

What's left is the purposeful manipulative lie that foreigner talent is needed in the United States beyond whatever level of immigration is current. The lie part is that they really mean California, not the United States.

Disclaimer: that conjecture above is something I learned from a straight-talking American executive in Qualcomm ~14 years ago after relocating from Motorola Labs, outside California.

American universities are (currently, if not for long) the best in the world. A big reason for that is because smart people from all over the world come to American universities.

Those smart people come to America in part because of its multicultural society. You can come from India or Germany or Japan and live your life in the US (again, presently, but it's changing) much more easily than in other, more homogeneous countries.

That multiculturalism is what is being destroyed, to the United States economy's great detriment.

(The H-1B visa situation is orthogonal. Yes, the lottery system needs reform, and no America shouldn't be importing young mid-to-low level tech employees from abroad to lower the pay of other tech employees. But the war on immigration has a much larger arc than that. Sergey Brin's parents came to the US for its acceptance of immigrants and its values. THAT is what is being destroyed.)

>That multiculturalism is what is being destroyed, to the United States economy's great detriment. The economy is doing extremely well.

>(The H-1B visa situation is orthogonal. Yes, the lottery system needs reform, and no America shouldn't be importing young mid-to-low level tech employees from abroad to lower the pay of other tech employees. Eliminate it already. The H-1B is massively abused by corrupt companies that exploit their workers and lobby to increase quota limits. The O visas have no quota, if they're exceptional people as these companies claim then use that.

>But the war on immigration has a much larger arc than that. Sergey Brin's parents came to the US for its acceptance of immigrants and its values. THAT is what is being destroyed.

As did Steve Job's parents. They came to America and became Americans, as it should be, and they also didn't over stay a visa or sneak in. Conflating those that do with those that don't is immensely dishonest. It seems like anything less than amnesty and open borders is a "war". It's all about exploitation, especially for the undocumented.

That number sounded surprising to me, so I decided to read the paper that it's sourced from which is available here [1]. The first company they listed is SpaceX which of course is true. The next is Mu Sigma [2]. According to Wiki at least that company was founded in Bangalore. The next company was Palantir [3] which is Peter Thiel, so okay. The next is [4] Zenefits, which at least according to Wiki again was founded exclusively by an American. Shooting what seems to be 50% on the first 4 companies they list makes me kind of wonder about the accuracy of their numbers?

I'm not sure how they generated their list or numbers, but it does not seem well supported. I'm also unsure how they picked their 87 companies given that their are hundreds of companies with revenues north of $1 billion (which was their metric), that were of course all at one time or another just a twinkle in somebody's imagination.

[1] - http://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Immigrants-and-Bi...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_Sigma

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenefits

Let's say "Many of America's tech companies were founded by immigrants, or the children of immigrants." Google, Sergey Brin Intel, Andy Grove Sun, Vinod Khosla Dropbox, Arash Ferdowsi

Note that all of those came through Stanford or MIT. America's elite universities are hotbeds of immigrant talent that other countries would like to siphon off.

The current war on america's multiculturalism (in pursuit of votes and political power) threatens to deeply damage America's universities, and thus its tech economy.

I think there's a difference between the sort of high-skill and/or wealthy immigrants that create billion dollar tech companies and the low-skill immigrants that americans are mostly mad about.

There seems to be very little distinction though when those high-skilled immigrants are being chased out of the country all the same, or start to avoid America because of that fear.

There is wide and abundant distinction that the left seems to willfully ignore with immense effort -- the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. The argument was never anti-immigration, it was always anti-illegal immigration and anti-unrestrained immigration.

This nuance is important.

This nuance has been erased by an administration that has canceled programs for legal immigration, then used that retroactively-illegal status to deport people who have been here for decades.

Perhaps for you the distinction is important, but in terms of policy, there is no difference at all.

I hadn’t heard of this going on and it is very alarming. Could you point me to some resources to better educate myself on the matter? Thank you.

You can start here: https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/deportation-and-...

Except when enforcing these policies they always seem to target those of darker skin - irregardless of the actual status of their immigration.

That distinction is actually not the point. The point is that legal and high-skilled immigrants want to come to America because of America's multiculturalism.

If you start kicking out all the people who are brown or muslim or otherwise different, you hurt the society and make it harder for the legal high-skilled immigrants to live here.

(Not to mention that for three decades American politicians and corporations encouraged immigrants to come here and work without status. And that Irish and Italian immigrants came here 100 years ago before there was any immigration law; if today's republicans existed in 1900-1930, they would have demonized Irish and Italians for votes too.)

Oh? Is that why nativists oppose the H1B visa without supporting alternative means of high-skill immigration?

As a brown person it's become abundantly clear that the Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon view on immigration is certainly mad about something - and it's not skill.

I don't think they're mad, per se. They just want to get votes for their party, and xenophobia works. It divides the country, and amplifies hate, but it gets votes for their party.

An H1B is a temporary worker visa. So even if someone did start a company while on that visa, it’s not an immigration visa.

An H1B is a Visa with intent to immigrate. A TN1 is a non-immigration temporary worker visa. You need to do things to follow through on that intent, but it's still an option.

Strict immigration policies necessarily affect both groups even if they are meant to target low-skill immigrants. At the very least, it creates an unwelcoming environment that would discourage the high-skill immigrants from considering the move.

And too bad anti-immigrant policies target both.

And one is within our laws and one isn’t.

I don't think they check people's bank accounts when they hold mass trials for them at the border.

Or when they hold "trials" for 3-year olds.

I think if they're crossing the border we already know roughly what their bank account is.

Not that it matters because a person's worth is not defined by how much money they have... but also we don't know?