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?
Voters Scoff as Apple’s Tim Cook Declares ‘Deeply Disappointed’ with H-1B Visa Worker Halt
NOAH BERGER/AFP
3:19
Apple CEO Tim Cook says he is “deeply disappointed” with President Donald Trump’s June 22 decision to shut down some of the visa worker pipelines that prevent Americans from getting jobs at Silicon Valley tech companies.
“Deeply disappointed by this proclamation,” Cook said June 23. “Like Apple, this nation of immigrants has always found strength in our diversity, and hope in the enduring promise of the American Dream. There is no new prosperity without both.”
But America’s voters jeered and scoffed at Cook’s high-minded defense of the pipelines, which allow tech leaders to fill up their companies with blocs of compliant, controllable, and silent foreign workers instead of independent and free-speaking American professionals.
The responses echo the poll-tested public support for Trump’s hire American-first agenda, which is far more popular than the Cold War-era claim that Americans’ homeland is somehow a “Nation of Immigrants.”
Apple’s most recent hiring report shows how the company’s hiring of Asian visa workers is squeezing out Americans.
Asians filled 35 percent of technical jobs in 2018, up from 23 percent in 2014. That left 17 percent of technical jobs to non-white minorities and just 40 percent of jobs to white tech graduates. In 2014, 54 percent of technical jobs were held by whites, 15 percent by non-white minorities, and eight percent were not identified.
Very few visa workers are hired for lower-wage retail jobs , ensuring that blacks and Latinos hold 36 percent of the slots in 2018. American Asians hold eight percent, and U.S. whites hold 51 percent. In 2014, whites had 59 percent of the jobs and non-white minorities, six percent to Asians, 27 percent went to non-white, non-Asian minorities, six percent to Asians, and eight percent were unidentified.
A website, MyVisaJobs.com, shows Apple’s massive H-1B hiring of Chinese and Indian tech workers:
MyVisaJobs.com
This corporate hiring of foreign workers has shifted the demographics of California and many other states . For example, 65 percent of Silicon Valley jobs in software, computer, or math are foreign-born, according to the 2020 Silicon Valley Index
Commenters praised Trump for overruling his pro-Apple advisers, including one adviser who reportedly urged Trump in April to not curb the inflow of H-1Bs, saying, “Tim Cook won’t like this, Mr. President.”
Commenters also noted that Cook promotes the “Black Lives Matter” upsurge but uses the pipelines to hire Asians instead of black Americans:
The welcome given to Cook mirrors the popular reaction to other CEOs and companies that have announced opposition to Trump’s policy.
The Coming Demise of American Big Tech?
Future historians with an eye for inflection points may well focus on the Wall Street Journal of June 12, 2020. A page 1 banner reads, “Companies Pledge Actions to Promote Racial Justice” and recounts how in response to the George Floyd killing, Apple and Google are pledging millions to promote racial inclusion. Less than a week later, Google was more specific : allocating $175 million to sharply increase the number of black Google executives (30% by 2025), upping the firm’s anti-racism efforts, $100 million for black owned start-ups, $15 million for improved training for black job applicants and $3 million to schools to close gaps in computer education and STEM fields.
If Wall Street Journal readers flipped it over to the last page of Section A , they would have seen the banner, “China Pours Funds Into Tech Push.” The story told of China’s trillion-dollar investments in computers to overtake the U.S. in cutting-edge technology. Now more than a dozen Chinese cities will launch projects ($935 billion), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s five-year program will invest $14 trillion in artificial intelligence, data projects, and communications. Private Chinese firms, notably Alibaba and Tencent, are similarly upping their high-tech investment.
These figures of course tell only a partial story -- American firms are only putting millions into “woke” enterprises, but billions will continue to be invested in high-tech to match Chinese efforts. Also excluded are U.S. government-funded agencies such as DARPA and, conceivably, U.S. brainpower toe-to-toe will outperform the Chinese despite their lavish spending.
Nevertheless, it is certainly fair to ask why these U.S. tech companies embrace million-dollar racial justice schemes when every similar past diversity effort has failed? Have Google, Apple, Oracle and others, unlike their Chinese rivals, recently discovered that a diverse workforce builds a better supercomputer? Might the Chinese Communist Party now send spies to infiltrate these Tech giants to acquire the secrets of diversity as they now steal advanced chip designs? Most important, does this divergence in priorities harbinger a slow decline in U.S. technological preeminence?
Silicon Valley’s diversity push began in 2014 when Jesse Jackson set up shop there along with other more community-based groups such as Hidden Genius , Kapor Center , and Greenlining coalition . Jackson and his allies enjoyed initial success -- Intel, for example pledged $300 million to help boost workforce inclusiveness while Apple donated $40 million to historical black college and universities. Google sent its engineers to black colleges to teach introductory computer science and help graduates find technology jobs. It also created a one-year residency at the firm for students at HBCU ’s. In 2017 Apple announced that it number of “under-represented minorities” had increased from 19% of its workforce to 23% and, of the utmost importance, 50% of its new hires were from these underrepresented groups.
chip development in Israel . Successful firms routinely recruit talent from overseas. Surely if pools of talented minority software engineers existed, firms would uncover them with being pressured by social justice activists.
Unfortunately for diversity devotees, however, a review of hiring in Wired reveals that such hidden talent is nearly nonexistent. In the all-important field of technical workers such as coders, the share of black and Latinx workers rose less than one percent since 2014 when the big bucks diversity push began (the proportion of women did, however, rise substantially). Yes, tech executives can tout progress, but this is deceptive since the burgeoning number of hires overall post-2014 means that the blacks and Hispanics workforce must be sharply expanded just to keep proportions steady (Facebook during this period quadrupled its workforce).
Would employing workers from historically under-represented groups give U.S. firms an edge when competing against Chinese rivals? Alas, claims regarding the diversity benefit seem over-heated rhetoric. One data-free claim , for example, asserts that upping diversity would add an additional $400 billion in revenue to the tech industry. As these advocates put it , “…more diverse companies, we believe , are better able to win top talent and improve their customer orientation, employee satisfaction, and decision making, and all that leads to a virtuous cycle of increasing returns (italics added for emphasis).” Yes, profitable companies may relish diversity but equally plausible is that ample profits versus being almost broke permits the luxury of diversity while polishing corporate images.
Another advocate claims that “More than ever, companies mired in culturally myopic ideas are finding it more difficult to get ahead in a society that has embraced different backgrounds and lifestyles.” A further claim is that many potential employees cherish diversity and thus want to work in a diverse environment which, in turn, is a supposed recruitment advantage. Again, no hard evidence, and such claims would counsel company directors to fire current Tech executives for leaving billions on the table for ignoring diversity.
If the past foretells the future, merit is in trouble over the long haul. Today’s pressures are immense, and merit grows increasingly unfashionable. Diversity activists are attending stockholder meetings and harangue everybody with horror stories about working sans diversity. One female Google engineer explained how the absence of diversity and inclusion initiatives “…left many of us feeling unsafe and unable to do our work.” She further added, “The chilling effect of harassment and doxxing has impaired productivity and company culture.” Keep in mind that Silicon Valley is in California, home of rampant ill-advised social engineering so compulsory diversity may arrive soon. Predictably, discrimination lawsuits have been filed by terminated Google employees who were queer or transgendered, a tactic whose likely real purpose is to prod Google into hiring by gender/sex quota to pre-empt future diversity discrimination.
While it may seem impossible to imagine the demise of Google, Apple and other contemporary deep-pocket high-tech firms, the “creative destruction ” of capitalism is relentless. Websites recount the demise of Alta Vista, Netscape, Infoseek, Webcrawler, and Zune. Not even Microsoft has made Bing a success or could save Explorer , and Google itself bombed with Nexus Q . AOL was once a multi-billion-dollar firm with a near web and e-mail monopoly. No firm can survive endless bad decision-making, and hiring people by skin color, not ability, surely invites failure.
The university is the parallel -- diversity hiring began small but as additional diversicrats were hired and handsomely rewarded, racial bean counting exploded. Traditional merit became disparaged as “white male standards” whose devious purpose is to exclude historically under-represented groups. As today’s universities drop the SAT in admissions, Google’s “bias” against communities of color may eventually be eliminated. If so, white and Asian males will stop even applying for Big Tech jobs just as white males currently shun academic positions.
If the diversity mania goes unchallenged, American Big Tech may slowly lose its edge as consumers gravitate to better software and communications gear built in China though engineered by Americans unable to advance up the Google or Apple career ladder. When you consider the stakes here, one can only suspect that China is secretly funding the diversity push.
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