[slt2021]

One can argue that on the day when USA becomes actively hostile to immigration -> it will start losing tech dominance.

Continued immigration in the USA is vital to maintain business as usual, for one basic reason: It is too damn expensive for US Gov to give great education for everyone. Starting from daycare to college - if you sum up cost of raising a kid in private daycares/preK/schools/colleges it will be > $1M.

Account for probability 1/100 of a kid being gifted/talented in certain area like IT, and you are looking at spending $100M to get one gifted specialist. Just one!

It is much cheaper to cherry pick and import foreign talent and give them education at top tier places like Ivy leage/MIT/etc.

[screye]

To be clear, I am not against the H1B. I am on an H1B myself.

I am opposed to the vagueness around everything having to do with legal immigration. If you want to import the top talent of the world permanently, then make it easy for them to get a Green Card and regain leverage. Let them start startups, let them spend longer durations between jobs so they can figure out that one brilliant idea.

Lots of people exploit the H1b brute-forcing every single grey-area loophole to get here. Many aren't even well-educated. On the other hand, the MIT/Ivy League straight shooters follow the rules and find themselves locked out of any future in this country. Other 1st world nations have fewer immigrants, but the process is transparent, cleaner and has well defined boundaries.

Yes, import the top talent of the world. But the H1b does more to kneecap them than enable them.

[tekknik]

> raising a kid in private daycares/preK/schools/colleges

The gov doesn’t pay for private education, they provide infrastructure for a free, public education instead. Some cities give vouchers if parents choose public over private but it does not pay the entire tuition.

The actual cost to educate a kid using public infrastructure is average $15.5k/year/student, which brings the total cost per pupil to $186k. Given there’s about 50 million school age children in the US, that puts total cost at $775 billion a year, or a total of $9.3 trillion.

We can easily afford it.