[NYT] Why Silicon Valley Wouldn’t Work Without Immigrants

What percentage of tech jobs in Silicon Valley are occupied by people from those 7 countries? Or, more generally, Muslim-majority countries?

 

Most conservatives don't oppose legal immigration.

 

No clue, but I hazard to guess that it's more about the slippery slope of losing access to a country's "best and brightest".

Kind of like this guy... A US-trained scientist was deported, then became the 'father of Chinese rocketry'

 

All of them. Or did you not understand the unspecified "problem" in the OP?

 

don't just cut and paste, a little context is in order.

he was an immigrant from China, who was victimized by the Red Scare during the McCarthy era.

like Wen ho Lee (during Clinton years), he spoke English w a thick accent, fitting the pre-conceived profile for a supposed spy/communist.

his application for US citizenship was rejected, held in detention for 4 years, and later deported. The head of the US Navy at the time was quoted as saying that deportation was "the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a communist than I was and we forced him to go.”

 

Bannon is looking to cut legal immigration specifically.

 

This.

The left is still flailing desperately.

 

What I see is a Republican Party that as recently as a year ago was advocating for expanded H1B visas and expanded work permits for masters and PhD graduates only to now see proposals in Congress to restrict H1B visas with calls for further reductions in immigration.

I don't think Conservatives oppose legal immigration but I do think that loud orange man's outbursts against immigrants have caused supposedly "principled" conservatives to change their positions on immigration on a dime.

Keep in mind, in 2013, the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill that expanded immigration in a variety of areas. 14 Republican senators voted for that bill. Now we're seeing Senate bills going in the opposite direction.

Conservatives letting Trump just bully them on immigration is truly laughable. Then again, we're seeing the same thing in Europe. The pro-immigration Tories are now anti-immigration thanks to UKIP so I suppose we shouldn't be shocked.

 

Why is this so difficult for most liberals to understand?

 

Who is in charge in DC?

 

What does that have to do with believing, "Most conservatives don't oppose legal immigration" ???????

 

Yet here we have an administration voted in by the conservatives that wants to curtail legal immigration.

 

Source in this thread. "Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue said their bill would cut the number of immigrants granted U.S. residency each year to 500,000 from 1 million, through measures including cutting far back on which relatives can be brought into the country and eliminating a diversity visa lottery."

I wonder if geeimsobored's prediction about Conservatives changing positions on legal immigration will be right.

 

Interestingly both provisions affected by that law have a very interesting (and rather racist) history.

H1B visas were originally a workaround for the new quotas that were added to the 1965 immigration overhaul. The new quotas weren't based on national origin anymore so Europeans no longer were the beneficiaries of a quota system that was designed to maximize European immigration while locking out people from other parts of the world. The H1B skilled visa program was supposed to be a workaround that allowed skilled Europeans to continue to come to the US. At the time, the architects of H1B figured that the only people who would qualify under the skilled worker category would be Europeans. That of course turned out to be false as Asians ended up becoming the primary beneficiary of H1B.

The second piece of Cotton's bill concerning family unification visas was also created in a similar vein. At the time of the 1965 bill, it was assumed that since most immigrants in the US at the time were European, this provision would ensure that more Europeans would come to the US via the family unification program. Over time, however, Hispanics and Asians became the beneficiary of this clause.

So in short, two provisions of the 1965 immigration bill that were specifically designed to give Europeans extra visa slots actually ended up benefiting minorities from other parts of the world. And now the GOP has members that want to scale both of those back. How interesting that they chose these two programs to cut back on.

Give it some time and Tom Cotton might propose bringing back quotas based on national origin.

I hope our Conservative friends can understand how bills like this create the impression that the GOP isn't exactly immigrant friendly.