Two-thirds of the new tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, but the sector’s technology CEOs continue lobbying for more imported workers in pursuit of “diversity.”
“Sixty-seven percent of the new tech talent in the core working age group (25-44) are Asian, the majority of whom are from India and China,” reported Joint Venture. “More than half of Silicon Valley’s residents now speak languages other than English at home.”
Silicon Valley’s share of foreign-born workers is at an all-time high, according Joint Venture:
The share of foreign-born residents continues to rise slowly but steadily, reaching 38% in 2018 (up from 28% in 1960 and 16% in 1940), particularly for employed residents and those working in technical occupations. In conjunction with this rise is an increase in the share of residents speaking languages other than English at home, which reached 51% in 2018.
…
More of the region’s tech talent in 2018 was from India and China than from California and the rest of the United States combined. Sixty-seven percent of all new tech talent in the core working age group (25-44) were Asian, 30% were White, and a mere fraction of a percent were Black or African-American. Women comprise less than a third of all Silicon Valley tech talent in that age group, and make up less than a quarter of all technical roles at the region’s major tech companies.
Joint Venture’s 2020 report defines “new Silicon Valley residents” as those who moved to the region in 2019. It contrasted the new statistics with 2018, “56% of new Silicon Valley residents in 2018 (nearly 85,000 people) were between the ages of 18 and 34; one out of every five of those 18-34-year-olds was from abroad.”
Silicon Valley’s proportion of foreign-born residents (38 percent) is more than double the national average (14 percent), according to Joint Venture. San Francisco’s share of foreign-born residents is 33 percent, with California at 27 percent.
The foreign-born share of technology workers is not exclusive to Silicon Valley. Breitbart News reported in 2019:
Census data shows that one-in-seven software developers in Hudson County, New Jersey, were born in the United States, down from a six-in-seven share in 1980.
This wholesale replacement of American software experts by foreigners — mostly by Indian visa workers — is repeated in many counties across the United States, according to 2017 federal census data analyzed by R. Davis, a software developer in Silicon Valley.
A recent investigation by Project Veritas revealed Facebook’s policy of favoring H-1B workers over American citizens, and encouraging hiring managers to favor Chinese and Korean visa workers over other visa workers.
JOHN BINDER
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
AMY OSBORNE/Getty
HOW MANY ARE FOREIGN BORN INDIANS?
Image of neo-fascist runt mark zuckerberg
and his groveling, ass-kissing sycophants.
don't they remind you of how disgusting
techies robots are?
Tucker Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook. The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative” D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often advocate against regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For Online Bias Concerns,’
This is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com .
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco , which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities.
December 20, 2019
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate , technology, gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco , which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities. California hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software, and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de CrèvecÅ“ur described the American as “this new man,” and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
I n the second half of the twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state . At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its operations to Houston —have disappeared. Not a single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50 largest counties.
N o state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California , where professors are required to prove their service to “people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula , with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify for free health care , too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote in local elections .
Such radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people. California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study , over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant Mike Madrid , “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to help them move up. But today’s educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than results. Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth culture , creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion , but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to the Intermountain West . Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with California millennials forced to rent, with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners . California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought property when housing was affordable.
A fter Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the state’s proclaimed goal of building more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially in greater Los Angeles .
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric cars to electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states ; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield , capital of the state’s once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia .
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green mandates against control led burns and brush clearance than anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments of tech leaders , even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm —fail to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
I t’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive politicians like Garcetti —who leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation , and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment to other state s, notably Texas , Tennessee , Nevada , Colorado , and Arizona . Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor , reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft , the legislation also extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe Nation . U.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way. Recently, 110 cities , with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic chambers —African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change course is now.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us . His book on the return to feudalism will be released next year.
AMY OSBORNE/Getty
HOW MANY ARE FOREIGN BORN INDIANS?
Image of neo-fascist runt mark zuckerberg
and his groveling, ass-kissing sycophants.
don't they remind you of how disgusting
techies robots are?
Ex-Google Chief Uses ‘Top Tier’ Immigration Claim to Stiff U.S. College Graduates
MEHDI TAAMALLAH/AFP/Getty Images
12:28
U.S. tech companies need to import “top tier talent” so they can beat China’s aggressive companies, says a bait-and-switch message from ex-Google chief Eric Schmidt to the White House.
“The ability to attract and retain top-tier talent from around the world is the backbone of a trifecta where the best talent comes to the U.S., to work at the best institutions on the most cutting-edge intellectual property ,” Schmidt said an op-ed for Barron’s magazine . “Our nation’s own National Security Strategy says it best: ‘The United States must continue to attract the innovative and the inventive, the brilliant and the bold.'”
But Schmidt used this “top tier” pitch as cover for his demand Presidnet Donald Trump allow many Fortune 500 companies and investors to import blocs of compliant labor via the white collar, visa worker pipelines.
“It is a typical bait and switch,” said John Miano, at the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
For example, the 600,000 resident H-1B visa workers are portrayed by business groups and the establishment media as “high-skill workers,” he said, “But “they aren’t skilled workers [because] the purpose of the H-1B program is to replace ordinary American graduates — and it does that very well.”
The imported blocs of compliant and cheap college-graduate labor allow CEOs and their foreign-born managers to sideline the millions of American graduates who will argue with their bosses, take time off for their families, demand higher pay, and quit to create new companies.
Schmidt’s June op-ed was posted shortly after President Trump announced June 22 that he would shrink the inflow of H-1B visa workers so young American professionals can get a wide variety of entry-level tech-jobs.
Trump’s reform is being denounced by Fortune 500 companies, tech leaders , and investors because it threatens the technology sector’s control over their tightly-controlled labor force.
For example, Schmidt’s rhetoric about the “top tier” migrants ignores the public data about the skill level of the resident population of visa workers.
That population includes at least 600,000 H-1Bs plus roughly 500,000 foreign workers who get work permits each year via universities and the government’s Optional Practical Training (CPT) and Curricular Practical Training (CPT) pipelines.
The H-1B data shows the vast majority of imported workers are inexperienced graduates from low-quality Indian universities . These workers are not imported for cutting-edge research. They are hired by Fortune 500 companies to displace America’s outspoken and innovative professionals.
For example, in New York , 65 percent of the H-1Bs requests in 2017 were for recent graduates with Level I or Level II experience, according to federal data presented by SAITJ.org . Just six percent were for workers in the Level IV, or “fully competent” category. The 17 percent of workers without skill descriptions were to be paid just the Level II workers.
Even in Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park, 51 percent of the H-1B requests in 2017 were for recent graduates with Level I or Level II experience, according to the 2017 federal data presented by SAITJ.org . Twenty-four percent of the visas were sought for experience Level III workers, and only 10 percent were sought for expert Level IV workers. The remaining 33 percent of unspecified H-1B workers were promised wages somewhere between Level III and Level IV skills.
Similarly, the low skill visa workers get the vast majority of the green cards that are sponsored by employers. The data at MyVisaJobs shows 67,512 requests for Level 1 visa-workers in 2019, but only 17,598 for Level IV visa-workers.
Similarly, the federal government provides work permits to roughly 500,000 foreign workers who are enrolled in U.S. colleges or have just graduated. Some of these OPT or CPT work permits go to Ph.D. graduates trying to get jobs in the United States. But the vast majority goes to people who have enrolled in or just graduated from masters’ degree courses in lower-tier colleges. For example, OPTnation.com describes itself as “Best OPT Jobs Portal for F1 International Students in USA,” and recently posted ads seeking an accountant in Maine and a “software engineer associate” in Austin, Texas.
The skill levels of OPT graduates are deliberately hidden by government agencies, says Miano. “There has been deliberate hiding of that information … We have no measure of [visa workers’] skills,” he said.
Bona-fide experts can get O-1 “genius visas ” or employer-provided green cards at modest expense, regardless of reforms to the H-1B or OPT programs, said Miano.
Other data shows that millions of American graduates earn technology or science degrees — and never get the chance to use those skills. “The nation graduates more than two times as many STEM students each year as find jobs in STEM fields,” concluded Hal Salzman , a public policy professor at Rutgers University.
Schmidt makes token concessions to the data that shows harm to Americans: “It’s fair to point out that some visa programs could be abused by companies seeking to exploit the system. The solution is to fix the system vulnerabilities, not stop the economic growth it fuels.”
But Schmidt’s primary response to the data was his rejection of any curbs on lower-skilled white-collar migration. He wrote:
immigration and diversity are not just issues about political convictions; from a purely pragmatic perspective, they are also economic, industrial, and foreign policy because they support our core competitive advantage in technology. Multiculturalism is a powerful core competency for our country, and we should be doing everything we can to reinforce it.
In this case, Schmidt’s “diversity … [and] multiculturalism” package imports large numbers of white-collar migrants who compete for a wide variety of college jobs, including the starter jobs needed by new U.S. graduates — and by underemployed Antifa protestors.
The painful impact of “diversity … [and] multiculturalism” on the nation is seen in growing political turmoil, deepening civic disagreement, the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and the spreading riots and destruction triggered by the police death of George Floyd.
Polls show this corporate hiring policy is very unpopular . Many polls show that Americans want to welcome immigrants, but strongly oppose the award of jobs to migrants while Americans are unemployed.
In response, Trump decided June 22 to temporarily block some visa pipelines and to reform the H-1B program . The H-1B reform would allow companies to import “top tier” talent while barring companies from importing workers for the starter jobs needed by U.S. graduates. The reform will be blocked by business groups if Trump loses the reelection campaign.
Trump’s modest reform does not interfere with the J-1 visa inflow of the Chinese professionals who do play an outsized role in tech companies and the U.S. laboratories. These Chinese lab-workers are typically labeled as “students” to downplay their role as a cheap-labor substitute for skilled American graduates.
One of the things that we looked at was the role of Chinese students in American research. And for those of you who are shocked by this, I’m sorry but I’ll tell you the truth, that many of the top graduate students are foreign-born and typically Chinese. That’s partly because the really, really smart Chinese researchers would prefer to be here. They love America! And they love the freedoms…they want academic freedom.
But the foreign labor strategy touted by Schmidt is not working, according to Schmidt’s February op-ed in the New York Times
Even with their existing huge inflow of visa-workers, Silicon Valley CEOs are losing their fundamental competition against Chinese companies, Schmidtt wrote:
Important trends are not in our favor. America’s lead in artificial intelligence, for example, is precarious. A.I. will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a Defense Department priority. Leading the world in A.I. is essential to growing our economy and protecting our security. A recent study considering more than 100 metrics finds that the United States is well ahead of China today but will fall behind in five to 10 years. China also has almost twice as many supercomputers and about 15 times as many deployed 5G base stations as the United States. If current trends continue, China’s overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours .
The fix is to double down on the existing failed foreign labor polices, according to Schmidt:
We should undertake major efforts to train up-and-coming scientists and engineers, and attract more global technology experts to the United States. A majority of computer scientists with graduate degrees working in America were born abroad , as were most current graduate students studying computer science in U.S. universities. They are a source of national strength. A vast majority want to stay and contribute to American innovation. We must make it easier for them to do so. There is no need to wait for comprehensive immigration reform: We can change the immigration process for highly skilled people now to reduce the red tape, backlogs and uncertainty that threaten to drive tech talent to other countries — including to our strategic competitors.
Schmidt’s role is complicated by his conflicting interests.
He touts his past leadership role in the technology sector — he is a former CEO of Google — to present himself as an expert on economic policy.
But he is also an investor who gains stock market wealth when immigrants boost consumption and shrink wages. For example, he is a paid up member of FWD.us , a D.C. advocacy group of wealthy West Coast investors who champion a cheap-labor economic strategy.
The reforms would force U.S. companies to recruit more U.S. professionals at higher wages. The higher wages would reduce profits and stock market values — and so help restore the lost wealth of the U.S. middle-class. The policy would also allow U.S. graduates to regain management positions and control of U.S.-based companies, including Google, which is now run by an Indian-born, former H-1B worker.
Moreover, Trump’s reforms will boost the workplace clout of U.S professionals, so helping them to get jobs and the experience they need to form their own companies — including companies that may sap value from Google, Microsoft, Apple, and other top-ranked firms.
Trump’s new incentives will encourage more Americans to get technology degrees, further decentralizing the power held by U.S. tech CEOs. In turn, those professionals will put more pressure on U.S. executives to develop innovative and higher-quality products instead of delivering immediate shareholder profits.
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