[Vardhan]

It's all propaganda. There's no engineering shortage. They're all just trying to flood the market with more engineers from all around the world.

It's all propaganda plastered with a nice marmalade of feel goody "let's help the immigrants", or "everything great about our country came from immigrants", or other such variants of rhetoric. It's actually very smart, because it plays to the tune that people dance to.

That said immigration policies do need to change, and immigration is indeed a good thing for this country. Attracting talent is a lot of what makes this country great, but we need to be careful with the fine print of such policies as to not destroy our own economy.

[selmnoo]

> That said immigration policies do need to change, and immigration is indeed a good thing for this country.

I want them to change too... but in a different way. I'd rather that we take the unwanted and wounded, the homosexuals threatened to receive capital punishment in Uganda, the atheists who worry for their lives in Saudia Arabia, the homeless in Mexico yearning for just a small improvement in the access of opportunity (no matter how small of a step it may be). Let the Indians keep their talented engineers -- let them improve India, god knows it's got enough problem of its own, don't send them to us here so they can make another silly app. Let China keep its engineers, so they may one day create technologies that truly challenge the great firewall.

Seriously, is it just me who sees this aggressive attempt of siphoning the world's talent as being opportunistic and predatorial? This is not the spirit of America that Emma envisioned, this isn't something to be proud of.

    "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
    With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

[JoeAltmaier]

Idealistic and well-intentioned. But there's little opportunity in many places for Engineers to be fully used. Its a positive good for humanity to get the most out of talented people. That can happen in America.

[selmnoo]

> Its a positive good for humanity to get the most out of talented people. That can happen in America.

I seriously, honestly doubt this.

Consider the main force behind FWD.us: Mark Zuckerberg.

You're telling me the most positive good for humanity to get out of talented people is at Facebook, where the most valuable people to the company are those who optimize advertisement algorithms that exploit cognitive biases of a population already being challenged in all sorts of horrendous ways?

I really don't think your perspective is getting things right. If the engineers want to make great apps for Android or iOS, they can make it sitting in India or China or Brazil or wherever.

[JoeAltmaier]

Who says Facebook will be where they end up? Will the legislature make a 'facebook' law? That's disingenuous.

Silicon Valley is definitely a place where talented people can find their own, and thrive.

Americans move there, to take part in the opportunities only available by meeting and visiting personally. Its a second-rate experience to try to do it from afar (this from a guy that is 2000 miles from SF), especially if you've never been there and have no contacts.

[eli_gottlieb]

Highest delta to GDP is not the most good for humanity.

[JoeAltmaier]

In this international world, lots of things invented in SF end up helping people all over the world. It doesn't have to be about the money.

[blinkingled]

> Let China keep its engineers, so they may one day create technologies that truly challenge the great firewall

Aha! Eric Schmidt had to just write a clever email like this instead and he would be applauded instead of criticized. To Apple: We would rather that you keep your Engineers - god knows you've got enough problems with your services! We will keep ours in return!

I guess if the huddled and poor learn programming, get good at it and start working for less - that'd be the right time to send them home to fix problems in their homeland and look for other huddled and poor - lather, rinse, repeat and all of world's problem magically disappear. Hey "the other" people are malleable masses with no ideas/likes/visions of their own - we can do as we please with them. Oh and they all, being Engineers have absolutely magical powers to solve any problem you throw at them - Terrorism, poverty, energy, hunger - you name it and they will solve it no matter how much oppression and apathy and violence confronts them!

Yeah, you made it sound idealistic but it's hypocritical and has no chance of working. It isn't far fetched to say that if the Engineers in China/India saw a way to make great opportunities happen in their own homeland to further their and their country's interests, they would never migrate to whole another continent in the first place. It isn't easy to migrate you know.

[danabramov]

>Let the Indians keep their talented engineers -- let them improve India

It's all about the choice, isn't it?

Me staying in my home country doesn't improve it anyhow.

Those who try hard to improve it somehow tend to end up in jail.

[patrickg_zill]

Emma was never elected, never had to make a payroll, etc. She was a young woman who won a poetry contest.

So using a short poem as a way to justify the complete overhaul of American immigration policy seems a little odd.

[cscurmudgeon]

I love how the discussion has gone from wage fixing to keeping out Indians and Chinese in the name of improving their countries. FYI, Indians and Chinese engineers come here because they are just as powerless as your atheists, homosexuals etc in their countries (but not discriminated against directly).

[crassus]

We should give American citizenship to everyone in the world with an IQ test below 80. There is no way this policy would cause any social problems.

Can't make a living in the information economy? Uncle Sam wants you!

[untog]

There's no engineering shortage. They're all just trying to flood the market with more engineers from all around the world.

You could argue that this is the actual natural order of things. Let the free market decide the value of an engineer, not arbitrary government regulation. It is the Silicon Valley way, after all.

[rayiner]

Government control of immigration is a natural consequence of government establishing and defending a border. If you want to take the free market to its logical conclusion, we should get rid of that too, and leave Silicon Valley to its own devices vis-à-vis fending off hostile foreign actors. Historically that sort of thing has not worked out well.

[chetanahuja]

Note that the products/services made by these immigrants are sold globally, not just in the US. Google, for example, acquires more than 50% of it's revenues from outside the US.

If you don't object to google's selling it's services across the world on free-market principles, it'll take a rather large leap of (il)logic to constrain the employment to be restricted to the physical location of the HQ of this global company.

[rayiner]

Movement of residents is fundamentally different than movement of goods. Moreover, nothing constrains Google from hiring people in locations outside the US to service those markets.

[yulaow]

Free market is strongly against "Cartels". Because, yeah, ceo-cartels are another way of arbitrary regulation. See them as a "maximum wage fixed" and you get why.

[samstave]

UH, CEO collusion is the same as "arbitrary [executive] regulation"....

The free market is what the actual value of the engineers is - not how the CEOs choose to work together to suppress prices.

[untog]

Oh, I know. I wasn't disputing that. Just making an observation on perspective - that the current system of limited immigration is not the fairest, but it's in the interests of developers today to resist it being changed.

[freyrs3]

The natural order of things is that we have a process in place to create and change government regulation. If someone thinks that process is inflexible or arbitrary doesn't given the prerogative to break the law to get around it.

[SixSigma]

The natural order of things is the formation of powerful groups that ruthlessly exploit their environment. Ironically the Free Market needs governments to provide the institutions in which it can operate.

[username223]

> we need to be careful with the fine print of such policies as to not destroy our own economy.

Au contraire. Many Americans and Europeans would get a huge and valuable smack with the clue-bat if there were no immigration restrictions, and if licensing schemes designed to create arbitrary shortages of e.g. doctors were eliminated.

[Vardhan]

I think immigration policy will eventually be nonexistent, but before then many things need to happen. The developing nations need to achieve a certain quality of living across the board so that the people there don't all just decide to get up, and leave.

Economies need to become less decentralized, and more global in their scope. Which arguable is very much a reality today, but I think this is simply the beginning.

And there's a whole host of other developments that need to happen, but I believe eventually will happen in the coming decades. We'll see a more homogenous world, yet also a more diverse one.