US sucking up world talent: Silicon Valley wouldn't work without immigrants

The workers of Silicon Valley make unlikely revolutionaries. As a group, they are relatively wealthy, well educated and well connected.
 
While most here supported Hillary Clinton, tech workers are not the most obvious targets of President Trump’s policy ideas. Many who populate the world’s richest tech companies will be just fine if the Affordable Care Act is repealed. Most will not be personally inconvenienced by the proposed Mexican border wall.
 
Under Trump, tech workers could enjoy a windfall. They may get tax credits for child care costs, their companies may be allowed to repatriate foreign profits, and their coming income tax cuts might fund a luxury vacation or two.

 

This is all by way of saying: The protests that swept through Silicon Valley and Seattle in the last two weeks were not motivated by short-term financial gain. If you want to understand why tech employees went to the mat against Mr. Trump’s executive order barring immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, you need to first understand the crucial role that America’s relatively open immigration policies play in the tech business.
 
And you need to understand why people in tech see something cataclysmic in Trump’s executive order, and in the other immigration crackdowns waiting in the wings: the end of America’s standing as a beacon for the world’s best inventors.

 
“Silicon Valley is unlikely, as a phenomenon - it is not the default state of the world,” said John Collison, an immigrant from Ireland who is a co-founder of Stripe, a six-year-old payments start-up based in San Francisco.
 
One important reason Silicon Valley can exist at all, he said, is that it is welcoming to people from far outside its borders. “I go all across the world, and every other place is asking, ‘How do we replicate Silicon Valley where we are - in London, in Paris, in Singapore, in Australia?’”
 
The reason those places have so far failed to create their own indomitable tech hubs is that everyone there wants to come here.

 
“The US is sucking up all the talent from all across the world,” Collison said. “Look at all the leading technology companies globally, and look at how overrepresented the United States is. That’s not a normal state of affairs. That’s because we have managed to create this engine where the best and the brightest from around the world are coming to Silicon Valley.”
 
But, Collison added, “I think that’s kind of fragile.” Under Trump, the immigrant-friendly dynamic could change - and it could bring about the ruin of American tech.
 
To outsiders, this may sound alarmist, and perhaps more than a little self-righteous. Silicon Valley gets rightly rapped for talking a big game on its supposed meritocratic openness while failing on basic measures of diversity and inclusion. Women and non-Asian minorities make up a tiny fraction of the industry’s employees, and an even smaller portion of its executives and venture capitalists. In short, the tech industry is in thrall to white dudes as much as just about any other business.

 
And yet even a casual trip through most histories of the technology industry reveals an outsize role played by immigrants.
 
Last year, researchers at the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan think tank, studied the 87 privately held American start-ups that were then valued at $1 billion or more. They discovered something amazing: More than half of them were founded by one or more people from outside the United States. And 71 per cent of them employed immigrants in crucial executive roles.