Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by newuser94303 1176 days ago
The US has always made up for it's poor planning and educational system by accepting immigrants. SV is full of immigrants. By limiting immigrants, the US is limiting it's best advantage.

It is not like Washington is going to stop fighting culture wars and stabbing each other in the back.

1 comments

That’s complete historical revisionism. Historically, america took in the poorest and least educated immigrants. There was a major influx of highly educated German immigrants during World War II, but the modern system of skilled immigration through H1B didn’t exist until 1990.
immigrants which mostly arrived BEFORE 1990... I don't actually see contradictions between your comment and the parent you're replying to.
The parent comment said that america always made up for its poor educational system by accepting immigrants, and then used SV as an example. But having educated immigrants is a relatively recent phenomenon. Nearly all immigrants before H1B were refugees or poor and poorly educated.

You’d be surprised how relatively recently most of the skilled immigrant groups have been in the US. In 1990 there were 781,000 Indian Americans. Today there are 2,800,000. The non-Hispanic white population grew 8% over that time (and birth rates aren’t any higher among Indian Americans). The other 1.95 million or so are immigrants and their kids who came here after 1990.