Why Silicon Valley Wouldn't Work Without Immigrants

If they want talent, make them pay taxes for the school systems that generate said talent instead of relying on the heavily subsidized educations other nation's taxes pay for.

If they need new ideas, pretend the other half of the country exists and solve their problems.

All they are doing is sucking the top talent out of nations that need them the most.

Questions for Valley workers: at what point is enough enough? What will it take to pack it up and leave? Would you consider moving to a different country or returning to a home country? If so, would you continue to work for your current employer, would you look for a job in the local market, or would you found a startup?

Trump's immigration policies are truly abhorrent.

I agree with the article that tech doesn't work like a factory, it's people are not necessarily fungible.

However, attracting the very best people is not how the H1B visa system is being (ab)used at the moment - for example the minimum wage was set back in 1989, and should be more like $130,000 in 2017, given inflation. So much as it pains me to agree on anything with Trump, I do accept the point that it needs a review. And if the terms were set fairly, there's no reason it couldn't be extended to allow many more people to participate.

The immigration-related policies I've heard of were:

* H1B wage increase: I heard a rumor somewhere that they were thinking about raising the minimum wage for either H1B visas or NAFTA jobs to $130k. That shouldn't affect the Googles and Apples of the world at all; if anything, it benefits them because it frees the slots the cheap H1B outsourcing firms are taking up, or removes competition from low-paying startups.

* Increased enforcement against illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico. The "best of the best" that the article claims the tech industry wants should be able to get employees under NAFTA; I know people from Canada who do this already. So any policies targeted at illegal immigration shouldn't be relevant.

* Muslim ban: The green card/visa issues have other arguments against them. One could plausibly say that not honoring those legal documents makes hiring foreigners riskier. As for the actual people themselves though, 6 of those 7 countries we're currently at war with. Maybe not officially or directly, but we've been dropping bombs on those countries for years so they seem a special case. Is the article claiming that Google is expecting top-of-the-line MIT-quality software people from war-torn Syria? I know Israel has some pretty high-quality people; are there other places in the Middle-East(maybe Dubai)?

Is there any specific policy that people are worried will hurt hiring at tech companies, or is it just a general uneasiness about anti-immigration sentiment?

I'm well aware of trumps desire to crackdown on ILLEGAL immigrants but fail to understand how that's going to affect the normal immigrants that make up Silicon Valley like the Russian and Indian used as examples in the article.

The travel ban was the first thing I've heard from him that was abhorrent and the near universal smack down it's received from every direction gives me hope that Trump will be kept in his place by our established checks and balances.