Comment by bluegatty
4 hours ago
To help answer the question, because it's not an irresponsible argument at face value, assuming good faith:
Tech companies generally hire 'talent' not 'labour'. The people they need have specific skills and abilities, which are in short supply.
'Average Joes' are by definition not in the running for these mostly competitive opportunities.
If these companies could just hire average Joes they absolutely would.
That's not always the case - as local workers are sometimes displaced, and that could conceivably be seen an unfair. H1B for Tata etc. does overlap in this area.
By and large, if we move issues of 'culture and identity' aside, the US benefits enormously from immigrants.
Not in all aspects, but mostly.
Elon Musk, Google founders, Jensen at Nvidia, 1/2 involved in Frontier AI are 'born outside of the US'.
Those companies would probably not exist without them.
Maybe another way to think about it that the Bay Area is a 'Special International Economic Zone' hosted by the US, which is where Global HQ of many International tech companies are domiciled.
Apart from their staff, usually well over > 50% of revenues come from abroad as well, making these truly international companies.
The US gets the great benefit of hosting these mostly international organizations.
Were this an issue of regular employment, there's be a stronger case, but this is a more specific thing.
Because the numbers are small enough, there is almost zero downside for US citizens, and the companies that are created end up employing more Americans than they would otherwise. That said - locals can be priced out of these economic centres like the Bay and NYC, and that is arguably unfair.
> By and large, if we move issues of 'culture and identity' aside, the US benefits enormously from immigrants.
Yeah, but issues of culture and identity are extremely important, so important that it's farcical to exclude them when evaluating to what degree the US benefits from immigrants or deciding what immigration policy ought to be.
> Because the numbers are small enough, there is almost zero downside for US citizens, and the companies that are created end up employing more Americans than they would otherwise. That said - locals can be priced out of these economic centres like the Bay and NYC, and that is arguably unfair.
I'm from the bay area as is my entire family; and locals getting priced out by immigrants who work for tech companies basically characterizes the demographic trajectory of my hometown.