[remarkEon]

>It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.

I want to pick on this point, because it's the general refrain about this topic. If there is some thing that American workers can't do in an in-demand field, and the government sets up a system to allow non-citizens to do those jobs, most people will say that this "helps" America. But does it? If the education pipeline is inadequately preparing Americans for being competitive in this in-demand field then perhaps that is the problem that should be addressed. Right now it feels like we have a (highly suspect) "labor shortage" that is addressed via immigration, which doesn't send a signal back to the educational/training infrastructure that they're doing something wrong.

[hash872]

The US is only 4% of the world's population, so there's an enormous number of extremely smart people who live outside its present borders. I don't think anyone believes that even the world's greatest educational system can bring all of its students up to an extremely high level of general intelligence. We should be letting very smart people born outside the US emigrate here, which is a win-win for everyone involved

[remarkEon]

Sure. But the government of the United States is, allegedly, there for the benefit of its citizens. I'm not really following where this "should" comes from. "Should" in what volume? "Should" over what time frame?

[ThrowawayR2]

If you don't think that having Linus Torvalds as a US citizen tremendously benefits the US public as a whole, enough to offset any imagined downsides of a great many merely average immigrating tech workers, there's nothing more to be said. And that's just him alone but he is merely one example of many other famous examples.

[Terr_]

If you're gonna name famous people, there's already an O-1 visa program for that.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

[plynium]

O-1 is a nonimmigrant visa. You can't receive green card and further citizenship with O-1.

[remarkEon]

I missed this comment, but what does Linus' citizenship status have to do with this? Surely you don't think that conferring a US Passport on Linus made him who he is.

Not understanding what point you are making. Is it that any displacement of US citizens' employment via immigration of foreign tech workers is somehow neutered because Linus is really good at writing code and has a US Passport? Anyway, I thought he became a US citizen somewhat recently, well after the bulk of development of Linux. Wikipedia says 2010.

[throwaway48476]

Linus works from home, he could do that from anywhere.

[defrost]

Indeed.

The benefit to the US if he is a citizen is that then his taxes flow to the US and if he's resident his local spending flows to the US economy and that of any geo immediate coworkers there for the face time.

[throwaway48476]

There is only one linus, and his personal economic impact is trivial compared to that of the linux project.

[tester756]

What would it give US if they had Linus as an citizen?

[hash872]

Letting in a lot of smart people benefits the citizens of the United States, that's why I said it's a win-win. Do you think we'd be better off if we excluded Musk to hire a native-born American instead in our aerospace industry?

Just going back in time, do you think the US would be better off if we'd excluded Irish immigrants? Italians? Germans? If blocking immigration somehow benefits native-born citizens, you'd logically have to think our population should have stayed the same as it was when we broke away from Britain. We'd be about the size of say Colombia, maybe with a bit higher GPD

[remarkEon]

The current immigration regime is still relatively new, it is not as if it has existed for the entirety of the existence of the United States. It's an artifact of the late 20th century, and only just now accelerated in the early 21st. That's barely a single generation. So, no, I don't take it as a given that essentially limitless immigration - even if loosely constrained on "high skill" - is somehow axiomatically good for the United States.

[hash872]

I'm a little confused. It's possible to be very pedantic and say that the current immigration law only dates back to the 60s, but the population of the United States is 97.9% not from this continent. There was a wave of British, Spanish, and French immigration in the 17th & 18th centuries, followed by Germans, Italians, and Irish in the 19th & 20th. In the 19th century the legal regime about immigration was literally 'open borders', there were hardly any legal controls at all. The vast vast majority of us are the descendants of immigrants (my apologies if you personally are 100% Native American, didn't mean to lump you in)

[remarkEon]

I think you're the one being overly pedantic if you only qualify 100% Native American as "American". This country isn't just some economic zone that people come to and from for the purposes of commercial or business activity. If that's all it was, then a much more lax or liberal immigration regime would make perfect sense.

>but the population of the United States is 97.9% not from this continent.

This would be a surprise to the 85% of us who were actually born here. In its most simplified form, what those of us who are skeptical of the current immigration regime are wondering out loud is if these processes do actually make "people born in America" better off. "Immigration is always good" has been the mantra since, as you speculate, the 1960s. Probably worth evaluating that idea from first principles from time to time.

[buescher]

Not immigration - settlement. And not even exactly that in the cases of the French and Spanish. Would you count Hawaiians as 20th century immigrants?

[cuteboy19]

if anything the previous regime was even more unconstrained. add to that generous blanket amnesty etc and today seems more gated than ever

[vkou]

> Do you think we'd be better off if we excluded Musk to hire a native-born American instead in our aerospace industry?

Given where he ended up, probably.

Cheap rockets are nice, but speed-running a complete destruction of public trust, culture, and of any illusion that the country is one with rule of law for the benefit of a few insecure billionaire narcissists is a juice that wasn't worth the squeeze.

[mlindner]

Elon Musk is in fact incredibly popular, even if he is highly polarizing. His poll numbers are similar to Trumps and Trump won the national election.

[vkou]

Telling me that Musk is incredibly popular in Texas or Alabama is like me telling you that Putin is incredibly popular in Moscow. 'Strongmen' authoritarians peddling revanchist fantasies that'll make their country great again are often popular.

Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's a net good.

The man himself is an insecure narcissist who can't let any slight, real or imagined go unanswered. It would be sad and funny if he didn't own a speech platform, or hitch himself to an absolutely insane political movement.

[gorbachev]

Allegedly...by and large the US Government operates, however, for the benefit of corporations and rich folk (with some exceptions). If they want to hire foreign labor, the US Government is going to make it happen.

[throwaway48476]

A national government functions as a labor union on a national scale.

[christina97]

I mean the US thinks of its place in the world as much more than the domestic insular affairs of its citizens. If you look at it from that angle it’s obvious that vacuuming up smart people and becoming “more powerful” intellectually is what the US clearly wants.

[sebastianz]

> which is a win-win for everyone involved

Well... not for everyone involved. It's definitely a "lose" for the countries they are leaving from, that educated them.

[titanomachy]

The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering, just like they're not smart enough to be a doctor or college professor. All cognitively demanding jobs compete for the same (probably single-digit) percent of the workforce. Better education could certainly prepare more people to do these jobs, but it's not a given that there are enough smart people in the domestic workforce to do all the cognitively-demanding jobs.

If thousands of the smartest people from the rest of the world want to move to the US and fill these gaps, doesn't that make America better off overall?

[kbolino]

This is just brain-draining the rest of the world for the short-term boosting of some myopic statistics. This isn't going to improve the employability of median-intelligence people, and in the long run, it's going to exacerbate the same problem, but now globally.

[Cumpiler69]

>The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering

How many jobs require complex SW engineering rather than basic SW engineering?

[remarkEon]

>The median American is not smart enough to do complex software engineering,

This point, assuming for a moment that it's actually true, would matter if "complex software engineering" was all that this was being used for. Complex for whom?

[upbeat_general]

I think a lot of these comments don’t properly capture the benefit. The more skilled workers, the more startups/companies, not to mention smarter people.

But the effect is bigger than that, by allowing skilled immigration, it makes US universities and tech companies the best in the world, at the very least seen as such, which has tremendous larger effects.

It’s not a coincidence that we have the largest tech industry, and it’s not because we magically have smarter people.

[tiznow]

Try repeating this to a developer out of work right now.

[chabons]

I don't have statistics, but given the student visa -> H-1B pipeline changes, it would seem there are a number of H-1B holders who are educated in US colleges (either at the undergrad or graduate level). This indicates that the problem is not entirely a training gap.

[hedora]

Honestly, the US needs to (and used to) do both. We should have a world-class public education system, and we should aggressively get the best and the brightest people to move here.

It seems unlikely we’ll do either of those things moving forward. At least China’s investing in green tech, I guess.