[hunterpayne]

"Immigrants doing a very large portion of tech work can't be just because they get paid less"

It is solely about that. Remember, immigrants didn't really play a role in the US tech industry for half of its existence and didn't play a major role until a decade ago. This is despite the fact that US colleges openly and actively discriminate against US citizens for grad school spots for 2 or 3 decades now.

[ModernMech]

> This is despite the fact that US colleges openly and actively discriminate against US citizens for grad school spots for 2 or 3 decades now.

Can you provide a citation for this specific claim? I used to do admissions to a grad program in the US, and we ended up admitting mostly foreign students soley because very few US citizens actually applied (probably only 10% of apps). Whether that's because they were not qualified or couldn't afford it I do not know. But it's not because they were openly and actively discriminated against.

[ytoawwhra92]

> Remember, immigrants didn't really play a role in the US tech industry for half of its existence and didn't play a major role until a decade ago.

Bell, Wang, Fairchild, Intel, Sun...

[mlnj]

>US colleges openly and actively discriminate against US citizens for grad school spots for 2 or 3 decades now.

Isn't this just because foreign students pay more than citizens? Isn't this just capitalism and the free market efficiently allocating resources?

Something about 'having the cake and eating it too'.

[jakeydus]

Not just that, universities (especially smaller research universities) love having grad students whose research is paid for. China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil (less so now than in the past), Qatar, and others have all had programs for years where they paid the tuition and research costs of students at universities. Why would the university not pick that over a local kid who the university has to pay for out of their own coffers?

[bonsai_spool]

> Not just that, universities (especially smaller research universities) love having grad students whose research is paid for.

> Why would the university not pick that over a local kid who the university has to pay for out of their own coffers?

Universities don't pay for research - and departments usually don't pay for research either.

At the margin, a professor will prefer someone who has her own funding, but that person also needs to be competent, so I doubt the national schemes you are citing have made an impact on who gets into graduate school.

[gottorf]

To be fair, not many parts of the US higher education system can be accurately described as free markets or capitalism.

[convolvatron]

I've been involved in .. applied CS for 40 years, and the industry has been filled with people of a wide variety of backgrounds for that entire time. Even during the time I worked for the US DOD many of the people I worked were international.

[dukeyukey]

> and didn't play a major role until a decade ago

Sergey Brin? Paul Graham? Elon Musk?