America’s Secret Innovation Weapon: Immigration

Smart immigration policies will do more for American innovation and productivity than better math and science education, more spending on basic research and additional venture capital combined.

Boil this off...what is he saying:

"You should not improve the people...you should replace the people."

ardit334• 17 years ago

Disproof to your above claim:

The US soccer team is mostly out of first-gen recent immigrants, or people that were given a passport just to play here. I think a fair-er comparison is of Noble prize laureates by ethnicity or country where they were born. You probably will see a lot more even distribution. Americans are not any smarter then, lets say Europeans. It is just they have more means.

You will probably see a great correlation to economic output and noble price laureates because:

1. Richer countries attract smart people. You are smart, you probably are smart enough to be given great jobs/research positions and the best places to live in this earth, which happen countries that are rich already.

2. To do nobel price research, you probably need a lot of financial/instutinational backing, which you are most likely to find in rich countries..

thras• 17 years ago

"I think a fair-er comparison is of Noble prize laureates by ethnicity or country where they were born. You probably will see a lot more even distribution."

Ha. You seriously believe that, don't you? I'm impressed almost. In the U.S., 13% of the population is black. 2% is Jewish. Guess who get Nobel prizes and who don't.

Evolution is a nasty, nasty theory that happens to be true. The magical equality fairy theory is beautiful, full of peace and love, and is wrong and stupid.

noonespecial2• 17 years ago

"You should not improve the people...you should replace the people."

We're not looking to "replace" people. We're looking to add them. We have the envious position of being able to use our already considerable wealth to attract more of the worlds very best and brightest. This will allow us to build even more wealth and attract even more of the best... etc.

We've got the benefit of a virtuous cycle that would, if unchecked, allow the US to virtually monopolize all talent in the world. Severely limiting the use of this advantage may be the best thing the Americans can do to help the poorer emerging counties reach for prosperity of their own. How's that for unintended consequences?

sho5• 17 years ago

Unfortunately this strategy does not have the potency it once did. The two largest possible sources of talent for the US, India and China, have rapidly growing economies and plenty of opportunity. I don't know all that much about India but if you're smart and "hungry" in China there is a ton of opportunity. Why on earth would you go to the US? Same, to a lesser degree perhaps, for Brazil et al.

I suppose the attractiveness of migration to the USA remains high in ex-communist states, the middle east, Africa, etc, so it's certainly possible they could make up the numbers, but the days of automatically assuming Chinese and Indians dream of building their companies in the USA are over, IMO.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

if you're smart and "hungry" in China there is a ton of opportunity. Why on earth would you go to the US?

The freedom to criticize the government openly and vote in contested elections for the national leadership? That works for a lot of the Chinese immigrants I know in the United States. (Net immigration flows from China to the United States are still strongly positive in the direction of smart people leaving China and settling in the United States.) India actually presents the more interesting example, as people in India enjoy press freedom and free elections, but still find reason to move to the United States.

jibiki• 17 years ago

So people immigrate because they want to vote in US elections? What kind of change in American policy do they wish to effect? Wanting to vote seems like a very abstract motivation for making such an immense personal sacrifice. All of the Chinese immigrants I know moved for more obvious reasons (personal gain, marriage, etc.) And none of them seem particularly critical of the US government, or the Chinese government, for that matter. (But most of them work in academia, so take that with a grain of salt.)

sho5• 17 years ago

Consider the possibility that the Chinese people you know are self-selected democracy fans in general and US democracy fans in particular. While the number of such people might be quite high in absolute terms, relatively speaking I don't believe they comprise a large or even significant part of the Chinese population.

A typical American might be quite surprised to learn that his/her country's democratic process is not viewed with universal envy or even respect. Out of the Chinese people I know I have never heard even once that they would like to move to the USA because they seek political "freedom". In fact, quite the opposite; if anything they'd move to the USA despite the government. And it is hard to disagree; I personally have difficulty viewing democracy in the USA as a system worth copying. Don't think I'm singling out the USA either; many 1st world countries are single party states in all but name, IMO, Japan the undisputed leader in that ignominious race.

Anyway, this is a huge topic and not well dealt with in this format. If you're interested, here is an interesting translation I read recently of a Chinese perspective on democracy. I found it well written, accurate and fairly representative.

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20090623_1.htm

rdouble• 17 years ago

if you're smart and "hungry" in China there is a ton of opportunity. Why on earth would you go to the US?

There are various reasons. I'm sure others will mention the obvious political and government things. I'll risk the ensuing flame war and suggest that the lifestyle in America is better. My roommate's girlfriend is from a small town in mainland China, and by small town she means 1 million people. Her parents live in a 2 room apartment in one of those gigantic concrete high-rise complexes. In order to escape that sort of lifestyle you actually do have to be the cream of the crop entrepreneurial engineer with the blessing of the government. Even then, when you succeed you're just living in the same type of city, but maybe in a nicer apartment.

In contrast my parents are from a small town in the USA and they have a big house and 3 cars and play golf every thursday morning and have 4 kids and a bunch of nice stuff and can afford to travel to hawaii, or arizona, or montana, or wherever. And they are just normal, average people who didn't even start their own multi million dollar business with the blessing of the government.

There are definitely people who prefer the bustle of the city and for whom work and achievement trumps all else, including creature comforts. But for people who are into the 2nd type of lifestyle I've described, there's only a few places in the world where it's relatively easy to achieve: the USA, Canada and Australia. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I know about China, I don't believe that sort of lifestyle is possible for anyone.

sho5• 17 years ago

Well, it's no secret that inland areas of China have climbed the prosperity ladder at a slower pace than the coastal cities. If you're going to compare an immature developing country to a mature rich developed country, maybe a better comparison would be to the richer cities, as that is the direction things are moving.

I have no wish for a flamewar either, but the attractions of a quiet suburban lifestyle, however opulent, are not universal. A big city is dynamic, convenient, connected and sophisticated in a way suburban life can never be - personally I find suburbia isolating and depressing. But honestly I don't know, I'm going to ask some of my friends what they think about that now :D

Hm, suburban life would be possible for some but you're right, you'd have to be rich. There is certainly not the low density, expansive McMansion suburbs you see en masse in the US. Houses do exist, especially further out of the cities, but they are smaller and very expensive relative to local pay, which varies wildly through the country, as your friend will no doubt attest. In rural areas it would be possible to live in a house more cheaply but at the cost of local amenity and lack of non-farming jobs, which are not famous for their high pay. So basically, no, not as we know it.

Anyway, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say China is some kind of utopia or even generally pleasant. Just that there are good points and bad points to both countries. Your parents would never want to move to a high rise in Shanghai; my Chinese friends would never want to move to a small town in the US, seriously.

anigbrowl6• 17 years ago

People like to go where the money and success is. If you're not American, the USA looks like a giant version of Disneyland, just as someone from a small town in the midwest may be drawn to a coastal metropolis like New York Or San Francisco or Los Angeles.

mbadoiu• 17 years ago

Immigration law actually deters innovation of the top immigrants. These students come to US to study at top universities, undergrad or grad and afterward they cannot legally start a business on their own. They have to wait to get a green card, which is years away. By then, as people become older, they lose some of the hunger.

The next best thing for them is to team up with Americans.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

I buy into the conclusion that immigration is good for the United States in general and particularly good as a source for innovation. Having lived overseas, in one of the countries that is a big source for immigrants to the United States (Taiwan), I have to respectfully disagree with the idea that what is going on here is mostly selection of people from very high-IQ echelons of source countries, and those people then doing things that lower-IQ people INHERENTLY can't do.

Most human beings don't come close to maximizing the realization of their potential. And many of the countries that are the biggest sources of immigrants to the United States have very much of a "growth mindset"

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...

in general in their cultures, and particularly in the subcultures that supply most of the immigrants to the United States, such that those immigrants, whatever their IQ scores, do more to realize their potential than people with "fixed mindset." Indeed, there is a whole book on this subject, James R. Flynn's Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ.

http://www.amazon.com/Asian-Americans-Achievement-Beyond-Iq/...

The IQ threshold for eminent achievement and even "genius" (as carefully defined by psychologists) is not particularly high, but is only about 120 on a currently normed IQ test. That, by definition of IQ standard scoring, is less than two standard deviations above the population mean.

Follow-up comments to this by request.

ianbishop• 17 years ago

Ironically, the 'secret' is one that everyone but the American government and the majority of the American population are aware of.

A NY Times article [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/googles-immigration...] published not too long ago outlined how much Google was spending on H-1B visas and their demand for the cap to be raised. If you read the comments or the backlash which followed, it made you very aware how the American public is still convinced immigrants are 'stealing their jobs'.

ardit334• 17 years ago

To back your thing:

My current company was closing down. So I started looking for a new job, and I was really worried as an H-1B that I am, companies are really reluctant to hire in this environment, b/c of the huge amount of paper work, and cost required for them to eventually sponsor me.

Within two weeks I got 3 job offers, and getting one more next week (they are doing background checks), with a lot of money. I mean a lot more than I thought I could make. What it shows me, that there is a real demand for highly skilled engineers, even in a downturn, and a lot of "i am an American, I can't find a job lets send the h-1bs home", are probably voices from people that have no talent, or desire to work.

This is truly work Americans can't do, as I am not cheap at all, actually very expensive, money and paperwork wise.

The secret in the Silicon Valley is that 80% of the code is produced only by 20% of the engineers. If I have my own company, (or you had your own), I'd want to hire from that 20% pool, no matter what their race, ethnicity, or immigration status they are. Unfortunately, you have people on the 80% pool, that scream (or wishfully thinking) that if immigrants weren't here, there would be able to command higher salaries, and find job easily.

It is often much easier to blame others, instead of just looking in the mirror.

cglee• 17 years ago

I don't think most Americans have a problem with truly bright engineers. I think the problem is when large corporations abuse the system to keep wages down.

Plus, yes the complaining will always come from the lower 80%; the top 20% usually have a way to solve their problems - that's the benefit of being on top.

maggie2• 17 years ago

I have a question for you. When applying for your new jobs as an H1-B, are you required to start the H1-B process all over again?

avner• 17 years ago

Good post. The other end of the spectrum: I used to write code for autonomous UAVs back home (commercial and military). After completing my second degree in the US, I made it through to 90% of the interviews and selection process at the top firms that play in such applied heuristics. At that point I didn't think I was wasting my time, given my background and experience.

In the end, I was apologized to almost everywhere as they couldn't offer me a position because of my immigration status and there were existing federal restrictions limiting their hiring of foreign workers. Nonetheless, almost all those companies still e-mail me today asking whether I would take a position at their operations in my home country because there just aren't that many good people who do this kind of shit in the US.

Why, I ask? Later, I got multiple offers from companies back home who were willing to pay 5 times as much and were either in direct competition to the folks in the U.S. or were selling them patented technologies that cost billions in licenses every year.

jagjit• 17 years ago

I have heard this from a lot of H1 engineers - especially ones with a couple of years of experience. I myself was one but never bought this reasoning - though cannot deny there may be some truth in it. My own understanding is that mostly this applies to startup companies: 1) They generally have a harder time recruiting so supply/demand forces them to pay higher generally. 2) Their spending extra on the work visa or residency processing is a way to buy insurance against the employee leaving any time soon(till the green-card is processed which is a period of 2yrs-infinity) 3) They generally prefer hiring recent graduates (and there are only so many US citizen graduates every year). Why they do so? Again I think because of a few reasons (though cannot deny there may not be any truth in these): a) Recent graduates are cheaper and are hungrier and a lot of the work does not need specialized phds but good computer science fundamentals. b) Freshly minted MS may not necessarily be better engineers/programmers but are more in tune with the latest tools in fashion which startups tend to use.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

I've worked with good engineers on H1-B's and bad engineers on H1-B's. Just because you're coming from somewhere else doesn't make you any better. It just means you came from somewhere else. And honestly, I don't think the ratio is all that much better.

The thing that I do not like about H1-B's regardless is that they are a temporary invitation (at least on Wall Street). I would much rather the system be set up as a funnel towards getting smart people into this country so that they could become citizens.

Finally, a pet peeve: When I was in High School and College, the importance of clarity in written communication was drilled into my skull like a maddened dentist attacking the mother of all cavities. If you're out there, and you're reading this, and English isn't your first language (or if it is and you just suck at it): Please, please, please spend more time when creating written communications of a technical nature. An absent punctuation mark, a poorly chosen phrasing, a confusing grammar structure can all pervert the original meaning of what you've written and slow work down, or at worst, cause something to be done incorrectly.

zaidf• 17 years ago

Google may be on the BEST end of the spectrum.

On the other end, there are thousands of companies that use H1B as an excuse to get cheap labor. These companies advertise for jobs as required by law and dump the resumes they get so they can claim there is no available talent within U.S. These are not conspiracy theories but rather well established practices.

kareemm• 17 years ago

True. There is a lot of irony to making it difficult for motivated immigrants to work in the US. When I started a company in the US by partnering with an American - which was the only way I could legally work for my company, despite it being perfectly legal for a foreigner to incorporate in the US - we ended up providing salaried jobs and benefits for 4 Americans, along with part-time wages for 20 or 30 more people. And this company is a lightly-funded, lean, 2y old biz.

Imagine what allowing, say, 10k foreigners in to start companies would do to the long-term health of the country?

http://www.paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html

kirubakaran2• 17 years ago

I wonder what will happen if people around the world can sell their citizenship.

Of course host governments have to do a background check etc and sign off on the bidders/buyers. Everybody wins, right? And I bet you can IPO 'eBay for citizenship' overnight.

DenisM3• 17 years ago

Citizenship of a given country is a commodity in that piece is no differnt than any other piece, so it will be traded on an exchange and not in an auction house.

kirubakaran2• 17 years ago

This is not much different from how Gmail invites were sold on eBay. While the invites themselves were no different from each other, auctioning helped the market find the 'fair' price.

Auction price will reflect the current supply and demand, affected by economic conditions and a million other factors. Remember that I proposing that people, not countries, sell their citizenship and move out to a country where they have bought new citizenships.

naveensundar4• 17 years ago

Most of the evil in this world comes from people believing in and fighting over imaginary borders.

kingkongrevenge7• 17 years ago

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

--alexander solzenitzen

naveensundar4• 17 years ago

I am not saying cultures should disappear. What I meant was national and other imaginary boundaries have engendered wars, genocides and other evils. Bringing boundaries down will not makes us clones in a 1984 like manner but may give rise to even more diversity due to the mixing. And these indigenous cultures are of no use when people are not free to roam the world!

_debug_2• 17 years ago

Bollocks

  - me

kingkongrevenge7• 17 years ago

This narrative where the second generation immigrants ascend economically is not actually true. For certain ethnic groups it may have been true at one time, but the data actually show that Hispanics descend economically after the first generation, for one example.

anigbrowl6• 17 years ago

Which data? Back up your argument.

kingkongrevenge7• 17 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/review/R60O7705YNTL7

"Throughout this book, our statistical models have shown that the low education levels of Mexican Americans have impeded most other types of assimilation, thus reinforcing a range of ethnic boundaries between them and white Americans."

As is well known, American-born Mexicans average more years of education than do their Mexican-born immigrant ancestors. Unfortunately, as Telles and Ortiz report, the third and fourth generations of Mexican Americans do not continue to close the gap relative to non-Hispanic whites:

"In education, which best determines life chances in the United States, assimilation is interrupted by the second generation and stagnates thereafter."

The fourth generation (whose grandparents were born in America) was particularly unaccomplished:

"Sadly and directly in contradistinction to assimilation theory, the fourth generation differs the most from whites, with a college completion rate of only 6 percent [compared to 35 percent for whites of that era]."

The fourth generation Baby Boomers averaged 0.7 years less schooling than the second and third generation Mexican Americans born in the same era.

Telles and Ortiz found:

"...the educational progress of Mexican Americans does not improve over the generations. At best, given the statistical margin of error, our data show no improvement in education over the generations-since-immigration and in some cases even suggest a decline."

ilkhd2• 17 years ago

I already gave my points about immigration in some earlier posts, but my opinion is: Immigration is irrelevant to prosperity of country. Several reasons for that: 1. The countries many immigrants are from, you know they have very affordable medicine and education (former Soviet Union, for example), so in fact any modern American big software company parasite on this cheap facilities, without any interest in developing similar things domestically. 2. There plenty of examples of countries with high rates of innovation, but with low immigration rates: Sweden (ericsson), Finland (Nokia), Japan. 3. I dare to claim, that immigration erodes values of American society.Imagine a person from China or India (the country where 60 million people literraly live in poop, they are born in cast of poop-cleaners-by-bare-hands), the person comes to USA and imeddiately becomes middle class (upper sometimes). Well, this new middle class built from immigrants from ugly places, thet have a lot higher tolerance for injustice and corruption.

_debug_2• 17 years ago

Systems are more powerful than the people caught up in them. The person who is escaping the "cast of poop-cleaners-by-bare-hands" is trying to escape the system that casts him thus. If you (America) ensure that only the best and the brightest are granted entry, then you get to both

a) preserve your system, without dilution of it's core principles

b) allow new entrants into the system who are hungry and desperate to succeed and start a new life

What the article correctly identifies is that someone who is desperate to succeed will go much further than others. This kind of inner motivation is extremely valuable and is what fuels the engine of America's growth.

emontero1• 17 years ago

Indeed. We've talked about this phenomenon before. Here's the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678144

This was my remark on the matter:

As a foreigner in the US about to finish a MS degree in IT and travel back home, I find Friedman's words apropos. The limitation on H-1B visas does more harm than good. I've met many young, intelligent knowledge workers about to get their advanced degrees who, unfortunately, find themselves unable to stay in this country because of visa restrictions. Sending those brains back home is a mistake. A new approach is required if the US veritably wants to foster innovation and entrepreneurship.

It's good to see more and more people are joining us and voicing their opinions loudly. Evidently, the H-1B program needs some major tweaking. The more people know and understand the implications of what's at stake here, the better.

petercooper• 17 years ago

one that targets the best and brightest around the globe and makes it easy for them to become permanent residents. We should be recruiting the world’s best talent the same way top companies recruit the best talent.

No! Google ostensibly hires all of the "best talent" in the industry, yet what do you see of it?

If the government takes on some policy of allowing the world's "best and brightest" to immigrate, you're not necessarily getting the people who would have produced the most value. Instead you'll get people who have tons of qualifications and degrees.

Let's say France had this same immigration idea back in 1980. Would Bill Gates have been considered one of the brightest and greatest and allowed in? No. Would Larry Ellison? No. Would Steve Jobs? No. It's next to impossible to pick out the true people who provide value before the deed is done.

preview• 17 years ago

FTA: So I would argue further that the “innovation probability” of a high I.Q. individual whose family has been in the U.S. for many generations is less than that of someone who’s new to our nation and has a comparable intellect, but far more desire.

It sounds to me like the author stating an obvious, and often repeated, point. Perseverance/hard work is a much better predictor of success than raw intelligence. Immigrants, for a couple of generations at least, have the work ethic. Based on other posts to this discussion, this fizzles our by the fourth generation, so you're stuck on a tread mill of bringing in new hard workers to fuel the engine. Is that really the only way to handle this? It doesn't seem to address the root cause.

As far as the requirement to post a job to prove no American worker could fill the role, I think it's common knowledge that this aspect of the system is heavily (and easily) gamed.

The H1-B program does need to be reworked. It seems like the H1-B visa should provide more freedom to the individual to innovate--start their own company and not be so beholden to their sponsor. I am making an assumption that the hard working, hungry H1-B holder is more likely to start their own company. This is where innovation creation thrives and, therefore, where there is great potential value in H1-B visa reform.

America’s Secret Innovation Weapon: Immigration

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