Comment by kylecazar
10 hours ago
The current CEO's of Alphabet, MSFT, Nvidia, Uber, IBM, Adobe, AMD and many more are themselves immigrants.
There was an article from last year about Meta's AI lab, claiming all top researchers were foreigners. If you look into the research teams in any of the big tech companies you will see they are riddled with people born abroad. It turns out if you want the best in the world, many won't be American born.
Its not just about standard H1B's working in normal SWE roles. Immigrants hold key roles at key companies in SV and have a disproportionate influence on tech's direction. I agree with parent that we should be careful what we wish for.
Found the Meta article:
https://m.economictimes.com/nri/latest-updates/no-american-g...
That's more of a damning indictment of the American education system than praise of immigration. I'm not a fan of autarky in general but it seems reasonable that a country should be self-sufficient in smart people.
Its not intended as praise, but a reality-check on the status quo.
Our leadership in science and tech has always been linked inextricably with sourcing talent from everywhere. You can look at immigrant Nobels, patents, enrollment in doctoral programs, representation in executive teams in tech companies, % of American unicorns founded by immigrants -- it will point to the same conclusion.
Whether or not we should be self-sufficient is another matter, but we aren't even close, not in the highest echelons of STEM.
I'm curious though, what country would serve as evidence that sourcing talent domestically alone can propel a nation to global leadership in these fields?