America needs more immigrants like new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: WP

A day after Indian-origin cloud head Satya Nadella was officially declared Microsoft's new CEO, faculty members and former classmates of Manipal Institute of Technology, where Nadella did his engineering, expressed a sense of pride, back in America, where he is going to run the world's most important software companies, a need for more such bright immigrants is felt.

Nadella's appointment for the top job at Microsoft points to the critical role immigrants play in America's economy, especially its high-tech sector, where more than half of all Silicon Valley engineers were born overseas.

According to the Washington Post, despite Silicon Valley being the world capital of technology startups, the US accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's population and the majority of the engineering and entrepreneurial talents required for the tech sector is among the 95 percent of the world's non-America born population.

Intel's first employee was a Hungarian immigrant, Andrew Grove, who then rose to become the company's president and CEO, while Google's co-founder Sergey Brin is a Russia-born who moved to the US at the age of 6 and Yahoo's founder Jerry Yang was born in Taiwan.

The report said that if the US immigration laws fail to keep pace with the US technology companies' demand for high-tech talent, the next generation of talented immigrants would put their skills and talents to work building great technology, but not in America.