I am an American-born tech worker and every job I've had that didn't involve bagging groceries was created by immigrants. Without these workers my career wouldn't have been possible.

Economy isn't a zero-sum game. Foreign talents were the enabler of the growth in this field.

Over a long enough time-span it isn't zero-sum. Under any sort of limited time span, which is what people with limited amount of life live deal with, it is zero-sum. It doesn't matter how much money you spend, the economy has material and man power limits than cannot be exceeded no matter what someone manages to pull out of their butt. On top of that, the value of money IS affected by the total amount of currency in circulation as history has shown many times over, and only in a theoretical economic vacuum where customers are infinite does one guy holding a trillion dollars not devalue someone else's $1.

Why does America have all the tech jobs in the first place? It is because of people like Elon Musk immigrating to the US and building the tech industry.

Because US companies like Bell Labs invented it.

Ha! And who worked at Bell Labs, the US company? Immigrants.

Mohamed "John" Atalla, raised in Egypt, and Dawon Kahng from Korea, who together invented the MOSFET transistor, which underpins modern electronics and computing. Both immigrated to the United States for graduate engineering education and made their breakthrough at Bell Labs in 1959.

Yann LeCun, born and raised in France, immigrated to the U.S. in 1988 to work at AT&T Bell Labs, where he became head of image processing research and contributed significantly to artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born inventor of the telephone, was a founder and major figure in the creation of the Bell Telephone Company; AT&T, created by American Bell in 1885, later established Bell Labs.

Immigration has always bolstered the American tech industry, but the bulk of the industry has always been American. Just look at the distinguished members of Bell Labs. Many are immigrants, but most are American. The reason why immigrants come here is that American industry is already very strong. It’s not mutually exclusive to claim that Americans build a strong tech industry and that skilled immigrants have invented many new technologies here in America.

You are right about Bell Labs, the majority were US-born.

But let's consider one of the biggest innovations of recent times: Artificial Intelligence (transformers/LLMs specifically). Where was it invented? In America. Who invented it? Let's take a look. The seminal research paper that kicked off this revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. So only 25% US-born.

Have you watched OpenAI's demos and how many of their researchers are Asian? Would you prefer for them to remain in Asia and contribute to DeepSeek instead?