Does it mean it costed the US of potential opportunities? I don't think it made any difference in the US. But it surely helped in his home country.
While we are at it, what do you think of current visa issue in the USA? For a long time, I thought it was difficult only to people of Asian countries to migrate to US, but turns out it is equally difficult for any other nations.
In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world? Of course, there are a lot of talent and there is always someone willing to move to US. So it shouldn't be an issue, should it?
> In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world?
Of course, it does! The only reason the standard of living in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world is because the US makes stuff the rest of the world covets.
America is the leading economy in the world today not because it has the most number of people, but because it has the best and the brightest, gathered from around the world. We have the smartest people not because the smartest people of the world were all born here, but because smart people born elsewhere have been immigrating to the United States. Stopping this is not the path to creating jobs.
US tech exports in 2018 was $338 billion. Tech is our biggest export by far. Think of the US tech industry as a siphon that sucks in wealth from foreign countries. Would you want to make that siphon bigger or smaller? If you want to make that siphon bigger — and more competitive — how would you do it? By limiting the people that can work in tech to whoever you can find locally, or by bringing in the smartest people from around the world?
Keep in mind that the money this siphon brings in is not only benefiting tech workers and tech shareholders. When the money is spent it turns the wheels of our economy, which leads to prosperity for all Americans, not just the few that work in tech.
Think of the tech industry as a way to suck money from foreign countries and pump it into the economy of our country. The beneficiaries include all Americans, including those who work in restaurants, retail, healthcare, insurance, education, housing, transportation, entertainment and so on.
Limiting tech industry to whoever companies can find locally will hurt its global competitiveness. Such a move will not just hurt the few would-be tech immigrants that are prevented from immigrating, but American prosperity in general.
>US isn't by no means bad when it comes to standard of living, but it definitely isn't "higher than anywhere else in the world".
It depends on how you measure "standard of living", as it's actually pretty subjective.
In short, if you're a billionaire, you'll probably get the highest standard of living in America, living in a massive private compound somewhere. You'll have access to whatever food you want, the best medical care, etc. And if you're not a billionaire, you don't matter in America; only the opinions of billionaires matter there.
I think there are several countries, across North and Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, perhaps Singapore and Hong Kong, that could compete with the US for "standard of living". These countries don't have similar immigration policies or histories compared to the US.
If you think of a person who builds a unicorn as a national level resource, which makes sense because they create jobs, capabilities, and wealth, then you seem to be saying that it is good for the US to drain the national resources of other, poorer countries. Why isn't a good thing for Indian entrepreneurs to create Indian unicorns in India?
I'm an engineer that moved to Canada. Let me tell you, I am here because they made it easy (or at least do-able) to come, and the people made it extremely pleasant to stay.
In America, you also get the mostly immigrant-friendly culture, but it's orders of magnitude harder and more involved to get there. So it's not even on my radar.
Judging by the high quantity and quality of Canadian engineers I've worked with in America, I think Canada welcomes foreign engineers because all their domestic engineers already left for America.
Further, most of those foreign staff at tech companies in Canada (or, more likely, US tech companies' Canadian offices) are there because they are waiting for US visas, or can't get US visas.
Canada's immigration system favors engineers and skilled professionals. As the comment I was replying to put it this is a way for rich countries, like Canada, to drain the resources of poorer countries. This process benefits you, because you prefer to live in Canada compared to your home country, and it benefits Canada, because they get more professionals, but it hurts your home country who loses professionals.
Arguing I should stay there because I was born there is not even just nativism, it implies countries own their citizens as property. This idea would set the whole world back.
If they wanted me to stay, they could have tried harder to create a nice environment for smart people there.
This is simply an improved version of colonization - rich countries extracting resources from the poor. Only now, the rich countries don't have to bother with the maintenance of the poor countries - they just drain the valuable citizens and leave the rest.
As to what you, or Canada, owe your home country - this is a nonsense question. Either there are moral obligations between people or there aren't. If there are, then the rich taking from the poor (Canada importing professionals) or the relatively well off abandoning their poor countrymen (professionals departing their homeland for better lives in rich countries) are likely failing those moral obligations. If there are no moral obligations you owe nothing but neither is anyone else obliged to not point out the resource extraction.
Where are the lines of obligation drawn? Do I owe allegiance to my home country, which is a political entity with arbitrary borders? If so, why? Or do I owe my efforts and talents to the poorest people? Again, why? Or to all humanity? To my family, to like-minded individuals?
If you think it’s wrong for me to have emigrated for a better life, well, off you go then, you go save the people of Africa.
Australia takes in twice as many immigrants per year, compared to the US, as a percentage of their population. Canada almost 4 times as many. Singapore, New Zealand and Hong Kong too take in more immigrants than the US.
>Singapore, New Zealand and Hong Kong too take in more immigrants than the US.
Is this still true for Hong Kong after the recent Chinese crackdown? The stuff I've read says HK lost a significant number of people who fled after that.
Canada and Australia both use a points based immigration system. Both countries are isolated from land borders that can be easily crossed. Contrast this with the non-points based immigration system in the US and tens of millions of immigrants from South and Central America. As I wrote - different immigration systems.
Shouldn't the government do more to promote equality? The current approach makes possible to arbitrage at scale when the government can
* bring in a large number of already educated (for free or _much_ cheaper) foreigners
* often from an upper middle class background in their home countries
* progressively lower the bar on the secondary education for Americans to jeopardize their chances of competing with foreigners for STEM majors and eventually jobs in high-tech. Which hits the disappearing [lower] middle class the hardest.
* keep college education significantly more expensive than it is for the very same foreigners
americans can do the same - move to Europe for college and get higher education for a fraction of cost/almost free.
then come back debt free with great education.
I dont understand why Americans are not taking advantage of these arbitrage opportunities. You don't need government to do anything for you, just take your destiny in your own hands
* part of the problem is that education is not funded much federally but mostly by cash strapped states and localities, and there are many reasons why politicians and parents may not want local control or funding to be loosened.
* part of the problem is that there are huge segments of politicians who are not interested in or do not want equality, and to that end even actively try to destroy education
> While we are at it, what do you think of current visa issue in the USA? For a long time, I thought it was difficult only to people of Asian countries to migrate to US, but turns out it is equally difficult for any other nations.
I suffered the consequences of the ongoing visa mayhem myself, losing my job in early 2022. Luckily, I received my green card soon afterwards.
The US immigration policies, especially for work and talent related visas, are incredibly disconnected from reality. There is still no mechanism in place to curb the abuse by IT consultancy companies, aka "visa mills". Instead, we have brilliant people rejected because of their nationality, not their achievements. Even worse, people with 5, 10, 15 years in the country, high earners and taxpayers, may see themselves kicked out because bureaucracy is just slow.
> Of course, there are a lot of talent and there is always someone willing to move to US. So it shouldn't be an issue, should it?
It is. At some point, money won't justify the looming feeling of insecurity, and people will be less willing to leave their home countries and come to the US.
Even now, immigrating to the US is prohibitively expensive. The talent pool is being reduced to those who can either afford it, or are sponsored by their companies, and this doesn't guarantee that the best and brightest are the ones arriving anyway.
Likely. The absorption of young, motivated people by the US is a major loss for their origin nations. Why this never seems to be a concern for anyone involved is the proverbial gorilla in the room.
> Why this never seems to be a concern for anyone involved is the proverbial gorilla in the room.
Young, motivated, smart, driven, creative, innovative, persistent…hmm, all the right ingredients to successfully challenge the existing status quo in many nations.
If you were part of the elite in those nations, what’s not to love about the current setup where the US not only absorbs the best and brightest who have a shot at upending your sinecure but even if those best of the best return to your nation, they are usually turned towards industrial rather than sociopolitical leadership pursuits that would bring “disruptive innovation” to your sphere?
> Does it mean it costed the US of potential opportunities? I don't think it made any difference in the US. But it surely helped in his home country.
Our immigration service hands out N visas a year. You reject one, someone else will pick up that slot. On an average it should not make a difference either for US or the other country unless they are so small their number of visas doubled or something because of this one reject.
> In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world?
Yes it does make a difference, but fixing that has other impacts. In the 90s when the H1 visa regime started (or got big), if someone in Ceylon wanted to write software for an American company, they probably could not do it, at least in the early 90s. They did not have too many other options so US not acquiring an available talent did not impact them. Nowadays such un-acquired talent can do anything - set up a company, work for Russia (or choose any other name who you would rather not have acquire talent, maybe an oil company). However, the fix is not so simple. To acquire all the talent pool would require upping our immigration intake many fold, and that is not going to happen for various reasons (politics, cost, limits to how much immigration can you absorb).
That number is pretty clearly a number pulled out of someone's ass, rather than anything 'scientific'. It's a nice round number that sounded good to someone, but is pretty completely disconnected from reality.
agree, since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space, most unicorns in India are just companies that already exist in some form in USA. In India, the execution of a business is the hard part by far, and not the novelty of the idea.
> ...since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space
The fact that the tech scene in the West (which is the place where most things happen) is white-male dominated and likely outranks Indians by a factor of 10x (?), which means, as a group, they're likely to accomplish 10x in a lot of metrics.
Also, India is roughly 5x / 10x behind the US in tech salaries too (amidst high inflation and weakening currency), resulting in the infamous brain drain to the West (where they then make things happen, if they catch a break).
This idiom is referring to the maturity of their tech industry at a high level, not their tooling (though that could be a minor part of it).
As an example, a country with paper-only tax filing might be said to be a decade behind a country with easy online e-file. It’s referring to the difference in technical capabilities, capacity, and/or innovation.
I guess they're trying to say that things like Uber, Amazon, Door Dash, AirBNB, Venmo etc. have a strong foothold in USA, but in India there's a lot of "home grown" alternatives that have beaten the US big tech to adapt to the Indian market. eg. Ola, Flipkart, Paytm, etc.
I feel that a reason for this is the cheap human labor available in India, which naturally allows manual-powered processes to scale much more easily in India compared to tech solutions. Also, given the sheer size of the market, even building CRUD apps backed by manual labor for more and more niche use-cases can still garner a lot of users (but revenue per user is still quite low). And note that there is nearly no upside to actually replace the manual component or build state of the art tech solutions because labor costs are relatively small and non-prohibitive
dude no. most foreign apps won't work in india bcz we don't like to pay for apps.
"people come to india for dau, not arpu" ~ kunal shah on the knowledge project [0]
tiktok executed perfectly bcz they were optimizing for dau but even flipkart is doing better than amazon here. many apps just won't work bcz they don't understand. see how netflix lost by asking to pay?
people don't understand india as much as they think they do so i'd suggest you to watch the video below as it covers actual india from an actual indian who understands it.
While we are at it, what do you think of current visa issue in the USA? For a long time, I thought it was difficult only to people of Asian countries to migrate to US, but turns out it is equally difficult for any other nations.
In the long term, does it make a difference in US if it doesn't bring talent across the world? Of course, there are a lot of talent and there is always someone willing to move to US. So it shouldn't be an issue, should it?