Ask HN: Why are US tech workers so pro open borders?

I'm not entirely against it either. I want everyone everywhere to have the best opportunities. I'm ok with things adjusting a little bit globally even if that means my own earnings go down a bit.

It is interesting though seeing US tech companies, making US level revenue streams, with their US owners making massive profits go from hiring highly paid Americans to hiring overseas people for 25% or less.

Not to be hyper-nationalistic or anything like that, but US tech workers used to get to take advantage of the wealth of the US tech industry. Obviously lots still to do, but many people are unemployed for a long time right now or taking jobs at lower pay. Meanwhile the US owners are making record profits. Feels like a part of the system isn't working anymore.

All that said, I also can't really justify hiring an American developer over an Eastern European developer in many cases. Not all, but many.

Silicon Valley industry grew big before major tech immigrant inflows. Also, you're assuming that US people can't do the jobs of visa people.

That answer does not make sense. Why would companies offshore if not having access to immigrant labour receiving the same pay as US labour?

Beyond the saying that US is a nation of immigrants, as an Asian, it's clear that the more open the US IT industry becomes, the more advantageous it is for the US.

I live in Korea, so my perspective differs a bit from people here. I've worked with clients in Korea, China, and Japan, and I've also collaborated with Americans.

To be precise, this is a classic core-periphery model problem in macroeconomics. People often say that open source is open to everyone, but if you're not a native English speaker, participation is difficult. That's the first barrier. It's hard for products of lower quality than open source to become commercialized, right?

And that's where the problem begins. US big tech companies use open source and global platforms to extract free labor and data from peripheral developers around the world, building exclusive profit models.

It's open in form, but in practice, participation is stratified.

They control the infrastructure and standards of the 'open source ecosystem,' and developers in third-world countries, including Korea, end up working as subcontractors that conform to those standards. They become digital tenant farmers.

Of course, the tenant farmers also benefit. It's just that the structure of the benefits is asymmetric compared to the landlords

The tenant farmers (developers from countries other than the US) work hard on the land provided by the landlord (US open source frameworks and platforms), but the landlord reaps all the final harvest.

To learn how to use US infrastructure, people in other countries introduce certifications and other gatekeeping mechanisms. In other words, the entire industry is dependent on US technology. Ecosystem capture is the US strategy.

Google released Android and Kubernetes, and Meta released React, precisely to control the ecosystem standards. It's the most efficient strategy.

So it requires more cognitive overhead. And because of that openness, sovereign programming or machine-native programming never emerged, leading to a complete cultural dependency—which also makes it easier to manage.

In fact, there are quite a few ways of thinking that feel natural to the Western programming industry that feel foreign to me

The more open it becomes, the more participants join, and the harder it becomes for non-native English speakers to keep up. China seems to be catching up with its 1.4 billion population, but looking at Gitee, they're still heavily dependent on the US.

It's free, but it's not free at all.

But is open borders really all that bad? My answer is no. Domination is inevitable anyway. It's just that domination through open borders is easier to gain consent from the dominated than through closed borders.

Participation in an open empire is better than submission to a closed one. It's just asymmetric.

As Gramsci said, domination comes from the consent of the dominated. In that sense, a refined form of domination like open borders, even if asymmetric, is acceptable enough

I'd put the shift even later than that. 2015 maybe. I think 2008 redirected a lot of people who would have gone into "Business" in the abstract towards tech, eroding the prior engineering culture, and then it took a few years for that crowd to establish themselves as a relevant voice in the community.

Looking back, the reaction to Aaron Shwartz's death in 2013 was, IMO, indicative of the older culture. It definitely felt like a minority viewpoint by the time Covid rolled around. So, somewhere in there.