Immigrants a Driving Force Behind Start-Ups, Study Says - washingtonpost.com:
"About 25 percent of the technology and engineering companies launched in the past decade had at least one foreign-born founder, according to a study released yesterday that throws new information into the debate over foreign workers who arrive in the United States on specialty visas.
The report, based on telephone surveys with 2,054 companies and projections by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and at Duke University, found that immigrants -- mostly from India and China -- helped start hundreds of companies with estimated sales of nearly $50 billion. It was written by a former technology executive who was an immigrant himself."
Thursday, January 04, 2007
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2 comments:
This article is a response to the tabling of the SKIL Bill last week. It has been reprinted in the business sections of many newspapers - heavily edited removing the CIS material; leaving it essentially a pro business OP ED by Scott McNealy.
The diligent reader will find that author was unable to cite a SINGLE case of a H1B visa worker imported since 1990 that founded a tech company: "It is unknown how many of the immigrants who founded technology companies had H-1B visas." Duh! The answer is NONE(0)! Certainly during the dot-com boom, they were used to "pad" out some positions in defunct tech companies - but they are all gone now.
What she is trying to do is mislead the reader: using the fact that a FEW(3 cited) members of the founder teams of some of the tech companies were born abroad as an excuse to justify the importation of thousands of cheap, exploitable and low paid H1B visa workers. Don't kid yourself: The H1B visa program is a POWERFUL government subsidy that corporate does not want to give up even long after off-shoring and outsourcing made it unnecessary. No one disagrees that the truly "rare workers" should be imported; however, almost ALL H1B visa workers are essentially indentured servants doing routine work that Americans can or could be cheaply re-trained to do!
As a result, IT careers for native born Americans are short lived - many cannot find work after age 30 and American kids are scared to enter the field. Can you blame them? Would a "smart" person waste time on a 4 or 8 year degree only work in a career that pay little and lasts only a few years? Reality check: your barber makes more than most H1B visa workers!
Imagine what would have happened if this program had been around in the 70s? Suppose Steve Job and Steve Wozniak had been replaced by "cheap help" from China or India: THERE MIGHT HAVE NEVER BEEN AN APPLE COMPUTER! Wake up, McFly!
Anyone who is seriously interested in the impact of this dangerous program should visit the Programmers Guild website or research the work of Dr. Norman Matloff at UC Davis. It's time to send Chang and Patel in the IT department home and give these jobs back to Americans!
I am no expert on the pending legislation. Indeed, I don't know much about H1B visas versus other visas.
I am under the impression that a immigrants to the United States have indeed helped to create a lot of innovative start up firms, and indeed I know some of immigrants who have done so personally.
I am disturbed by the know-nothing attitude of the previous comment.
I note that that a study done a while ago found the average time from first to last grant application to NIH was seven years. Thus people trained to the doctorate level, generally required for submitting an independent grant application to NIH, on the average only had a seven year research career. That does not mean that their education and training was no longer useful, but only that many people with doctorates go on to other work leaving the lab bench after a while.
Education counts, and people should seek out educational opportunities. The world is a complicated, fast changing place, and people should plan to upgrade skills and change jobs and careers during their lifetimes.
Four to eight years of college should not be regarded as a guarantee of lifetime employment in the field for which one was trained. (I went to engineering school for seven years myself, and my circuit design skills and skills in the logical design of computers were rather quickly outmoded by the introduction of integrated circuits and computer chips.)
But there are all sorts of other reasons for open immigration to the United States. One is simple fairness, that we as immigrants or the children of immigrants should not lightly deny the opportunity to other people that we and our parents enjoyed.
Another is that as a great power, we need to overcome our insularity and learn more about the world. We can do so by opening our borders to people who speak other languages, who understand other cultures, and who can bring their knowledge to bear on our international economic and diplomatic interests.
For more on the economics of international migration, look at this posting.
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