Keep in mind that this is despite H1B rules disallowing most Indians from founding companies, and the 100+ year backlog for educated professional Indian immigrants gaining permanent residency meaning the U.S. system will never allow them to found a company within the country.
So the doors are closed for legal immigrants - by the very definition people who are allowed to immigrate?
Or do you mean that there is less immigration to the US in general?
Or that only the illegal uneducated are „allowed“ to immigrate?
Per https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/2023_0818_pl... (table 1, "PERSONS OBTAINING LAWFUL PERMANENT RESIDENT STATUS: FISCAL YEARS 1820 TO 2022"), legal immigration seems to have stayed pretty steady since the 90s. Compare to the 1900s though when the same amount became residents (per capita a much higher amount)...
Lots of interesting stats in there actually - like the fact that "EXPULSIONS AND NONCITIZEN APPREHENSIONS" has actually doubled the record high in the last 2 years of data...
Anecdotal evidence of course but I’ve had coworkers who get masters degrees because that somehow helps their chances of getting permanent status or something similar.
Is it possible that it’s more and more competitive as there are more people who are trying to immigrate?
If the number of legal immigrants has remained steady within a given time period, but the number of illegal immigrants has increased within the same time period, we can infer that the total number of prospective immigrants has also increased; This inference paired with the first fact presented can allow us to safely assume that competition for legal immigration has in fact increased.
By definition - if you want to immigrate to the US (legally) you must be successful.
For example, L1 Visa, will require your company to employ at least 15 people in the US by the end of it. So you either start a company successful enough to hire at least 15 people, or you go home.
If you aspire to live in the US at the end of it, it's a hell of a motivator.
I'll just add - this beneficial system is largely being closed down due to illegal immigration in the US, which "fills" the caps in many places. It may be hurtful to the US long term.
This is an interesting phenomenon that has happened before. You can look back at most ancient empires and find that at their peak they had vibrant cities, populated with the best and brightest from all over the world. Egypt, Athens, Rome, etc. People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there.
That makes the current debates in the US and the EU about limiting migration so silly and backwards. I come from the Netherlands; a country that used to punch way above its weight economically, militarily, and scientifically in the seventeenth century when New York was still called New Amsterdam. That happened on the tail-end of the rest of Europe pushing out intellectuals, religious minorities, etc. a lot of whom ended up in Amsterdam. You might think of Amsterdam as the seventeenth century Silicon Valley. Modern day dutch politics are dominated by populists with an anti migrant sentiment. They are longing for the good old days when the Netherlands was so great without realizing that migrants were a big part of that greatness.
Later London took over. And eventually the US ended up absorbing a lot of immigrants and became a world power. Twentieth century New York became the amazing place it is today. These events are not disconnected. You need a critical mass of migrants for stuff like this to happen.
I currently live in Berlin, which has a lot of people moving to it from all over the place. It's too early to tell for sure but I wouldn't be surprised to see some beautiful things happen here over the course of the next decades. If it does, it will be despite of the locals. Silicon Valley increasingly feels like it has a lot of greatness in its past but not necessarily in its future. There sure is a lot of money there. And some good universities. But moving there is not the logical move it would have been twenty years ago. I never did but it could have easily happened.
> People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there.
Not saying you're wrong.. but what's the proof? It's easy to think of counterexamples. Places like Malaysia that are full of immigrants and are not particularly successful. Or Japan, which is notoriously insular and successful. London has the whole industrial revolution and boom before colonialism and the wave of immigrants
One would also expect a major difference between for instance the US siphoning off the world's top talent (ex: post USSR collapse immigrants from the scientific community) and undereducated economic refugees from Central America. For instance you're not exactly seeing a flood of Latin-America-born founders in the US (not the best metric, but still)
I'm not a historian of course. But it seems that the empirical evidence is that this has repeated itself historically. You look at historic hubs of innovation and scientific progress and you usually find them in places with migration and relatively wealthy and free thinking populations.
But of course there are counter examples and there are probably other factors. London's industrial revolution and the boom of the British empire was driven by trade and a scientific revolution. That started with them cutting loose from the catholic church and limiting the power of royals. The resulting influx of people from all over Europe and later the rest of the world probably helped. Some of the more radical people at the time actually ended up in New England where they helped bootstrap the modern USA.
Japan's industrial revolution started with the royals realizing they needed to catch up and importing a lot of knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_era. Japan of course did not keep the foreigners but they did catch up in a hurry by interacting with a lot of them. China is doing an interesting reverse take on this where they send people all over the world and they then bring back knowledge.
So, yes it's not all black and white. But this stuff usually starts with places being open to outside influences and importing and generating a lot of new knowledge and skills locally. Typically, with the help of foreigners in some way. London is a melting pot of nationalities from all over their empire. And the US bootstrapped from the British empire and absorbing bits and pieces from other European colonists (Dutch, French, Spanish, etc.).
There is a difference between huge cities of cheap labor and innovation hubs.
> you're not exactly seeing a flood of Latin-America-born founders
Maybe not of tech companies, but you'll be shocked how many highly profitable "boring" companies like construction companies, staffing agencies, and auto sales/repair companies are owned by Latina/Latino owners. BTW: owning a business is legal, even if you are in the US illegally, also that has fueled a boom.
>It's too early to tell for sure but I wouldn't be surprised to see some beautiful things happen here over the course of the next decades.
I would bet the exact opposite.
Let's start off simply with the fact that Berlin is not intended to be SF or SV in any capacity by the German elite(you're better off going to Munich or Frankfurt for that). There is 0 institutional interest to make it an innovation hub on top of the political center, as once again this can be done elsewhere(preferably closer to actual industrial centres).
Secondly, it's simply impossible to get tier 0 tech talent to come to Berlin(unless you give a lot of equity or you have a very elaborate scheme to pay them via offshore, which most startuppers simply don't know how to do) due to salary/tax differentials with either US or even something like Zürich/London.
Lastly, there is 0 evidence that I've seen that German bureaucracy(Berlin included) is going to down, and that's been the case since the last 10 years. This will pretty cleanly stop most innovation.
Except at that time migration was a relatively hard process and quite time consuming so those who migrated had interest in migrating there to conduct business. Not just to come to the streets paved with gold.
For the last 20 years across the whole western world we have seen that despite having more migrants than ever, the cities are not becoming cleaner or more vibrant - but rather everything goes backwards.
Ancient empires, early 20th century USA etc. succeeded not due to migration but due to government and people willing to work for the government to make it more successful.
And expensive. In many cases if you were poor you needed to be hardworking or already semi successful at business to afford emigration. Plus you'd really get cut off from everything you left behind. Has nothing to do with today's emigration that probably equates to moving to a different town in the same country back then.
Yeah. It is basically coming to streets paved with gold - "I will come here and will have access to more services and things to do. There are lot of friends and compatriots".
Netherlands back then flourished thanks to being a trade superpower (similar to Venice a couple centuries earlier), not thanks to being open to immigrants. Poland was also extremely open to immigrants back then, but didn’t have the high seas trade and colonial empire - and didn’t do nearly as well as Netherlands did.
How do you think it became a trade super power? It was interacting with a lot of foreigners. And that was after they cut loose from the Spanish Empire around the same time of the Spanish Inquisition and the arrival of a lot of Spanish jews, French Huegenots, and lots of others in the Netherlands. The renaissance started in Venice and then moved North.
To my understanding, Netherlands had a long-standing tradition of maritime commerce. Before discovery of sea routes to Asia and Americas, they were doing a lot of trading within Europe (e.g. selling Polish grain on the Western markets). After the discoveries, it was somewhat natural for them to expand on to new markets. Spanish Jews or French Hugenots (to my knowledge) didn't have much of expertise in terms maritine commerce, so I don't think they were a factor (however, the Jews might have facilitated development of financial markets for financing the overseas trading expeditions).
I see many people speculating in the comments about whether or not this may be true. Amy Chua wrote a book (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Empire) which makes exactly that point and presents compelling evidence going back as far as the Mongol empire.
The modern immigration is a lot different than in the past. Amsterdam, London or New York offered no support to immigrants, more like the opposite, where immigrants worked themselves to death in factories, plantation, mining, etc.
And modern immigration can split between legal immigrants with skilled professionals and illegal immigrants.
Europe is receiving a lot of ilegal economic immigrants with low education, doesn’t know german/french/italian/dutch or barely know English, and many are religious fundamentalist. What kind of innovation do you expect from them?
I don’t understand why Europe keeps accepting ilegal immigrants.
> People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there.
What’s your evidence for this? It’s more plausible that immigrants come to rich places for the potential to make money.
I don’t know about the Netherlands, but Silicon Valley arose in America during a time of historically low immigration. 1920s immigration reforms caused the foreign born population to drop from 15% to under 5% by 1970. Bill Shockley was born in London to American parents but raised in America. Six of the “traitorous eight” that founded Fairchild semiconductor were born in America. All the founders of Intel were born in America, same for AMD.
The UK established world dominance due to colonial trade during its Empire era, the industrial revolution, and the rise of financial institutions (in the early 19th century).
The UK's international heyday came at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Arguably, the power and influence of the UK has declined significantly since WW2.
Immigration to the UK prior to WW2 was pretty minor (e.g. the Huguenots and Irish immigrants). The last census prior to WW2 was in 1931 and showed England and Wales had only a 2.1% foreign-born population. By comparison, immigrants made up 6.6% of France's population.
Widespread immigration only occurred in the post-WW2 period, due to serious labour shortages in the UK. It was then that large numbers of immigrants, mostly from former colonies, settled in London. And then there were significant waves of immigration from Eastern Europe in the late 20th century due to globalisation and the enlargement of the European Union.
With that in mind, we need to be careful we're not confusing correlation and causation.
My interpretation of the timeline is that the UK became an immigration magnet due to its prosperity, rather than its prosperity being the result of mass immigration.
> My interpretation of the timeline is that the UK became an immigration magnet due to its prosperity, rather than its prosperity being the result of mass immigration.
Also by having colonized a bunch of places whose residents then wanted to move to the UK.
I do agree with you here, but the broader problem with immigration is that in the context of your point I'd say that those weren't war torn or economic/welfare migrants but people who knew that heading to Rome would be for business first.
Essentially the type of immigration and it's lax rules in Europe isn't really comparable to labor immigrants, when you can have an entire city area of people who only lives on welfare with 0% interest in getting a job or even learning the language.
Which causes taxation to be delegated to an endless spiral of newly arrived immigrants who repeat the cycle.
And with that foundation you don't either always get 2nd/3rd generation that are working but instead doing crime.
Which drives the demand for labor immigrants down because they ofc don't want to establish themselves in a country that is dangerous.
Hence why most of the anti immigrantion policies are meant to only curb economic/welfare migrants and limit for now war refugees.
Ironically, most of the immigrants to Europe are from countries that have a strong sense of nationality and would never tolerate mass immigration into their own countries.
I think a far more interesting bit of information is that Israel has 9M people yet ranks second behind India with 1.4Bn people. Ahead of far larger countries...
Imagine randomly picking a hundred points on the globe. By coincidence, you pick one location in a small country. Now you look at the density of points by population, and that small country has an unusually high density.
Grouping data by country tends to get you these small country outliers for almost any statistic.
That data isn't random, it's based on countries, cultures, demographics etc. You see the correlation beyond number of unicorns. You see it in academic awards and achievements too. Claiming that data is just random seems lazy.
If Israel is doing things right, it's worth studying why and emulating it elsewhere.
That may be predictable, but I finally remembered to listen to Talking with the Taxman... and the YT algo decided I must be in the market for a Prada bag, so there still are some surprises in store, here under the sun.
EDIT: BTW, I think I finally figured out why the older bloke in the All Blacks shirt calls Ŋarritj "uncle". I had been confused because I thought Ŋarritj had been found as a fledgling, so chronologically he'd be younger. However, if the bloke were Dhuwa, and specifically Gamarraŋ, then his mother would be Yirritja, and specifically Ŋarritjan, so Ŋarritj would be her brother and his uncle. Do I have that right?
Maybe but not neccesarily by a long shot .. "Uncle" the english word used in any number of pidgin variation is a note of respect for an older man who isn't necc. a blood relative.
In various tongues there are more precise words for more complicated blood | marriage relations .. so "uncle" is mostly generic, but often will mean an elder from the same group, whether family or not (but likely).
Israel has 2.6M none Jews (2M Muslims). Yet you chose to focus on Jews as Israelis. That's pretty clear.
You also chose the trope of "Jews control finance" which is an age old antisemitic trope.
You also ignore the strong correlation between success in business and success in science, math and innovation. Looking at physics and math Jews have very strong showing over the past decades. E.g. try watching Oppenheimer and counting the Jewish names.
I'm sure you think you're not racist because you're used to this line of thinking. I suggest applying critical thinking to your stance.
AmCham actively encourages investment into the US economy, and has some of the best people you could ever talk with regarding business.
That being said, exporting tech products into the US economy is like giving your competitors a 2 year head start. The US trade and tariff system is expensive to navigate, restrictive on value-added services (free-trade doesn't apply to something sourced from 18 different origins), and constantly evolving on the state level to keep competitors out of domestic markets. Thus, many will choose to create legal entities inside the US to handle sales, taxes, and mitigate many trade/sales encumbrances (see Texas business registry for details.)
Many of these firms also create zombie entities in the US and Germany for manufacturing tariff/anti-dumping reasons. Accordingly, most of the value added still occurs someplace offshore...
It is very common for existing troubled known-brand companies on stock exchanges to undergo takeover by foreign firms to bypass domestic exchange rules. The new boards then acquire off-shore junk assets (China recycling depots or South American mines are popular), arbitrarily over-value whatever the junk holding is worth, and report the new "growth" valuation for "investors" to gamble on...
From an investor perspective... you will see both healthy entity creation, and the dirty side of stock investment cons... Tip, if a firms reported cash-flow is inconsistent with reported growth, than one probably should dig deeper.
The financial rhetoric of social-media and political mouthpieces should be parsed with great care... especially in an election year.
in my limited experience the regulatory framework is such that it's hard to expand and get all the certifications/vetting/background-checks if you're not US based
A startup I know has Chinese cofounders and it's basically a deathsentence. Investors all got spooked knowing any Chinese national has part ownership - b/c regulatory bodies are unpredictable these days
If you're in the US with owners that are US nationals the whole funding pipeline is very streamlined by the lawyer armies. If you're transnational then nobody wants to deal with that. VCs are ultimately full of very lazy people that want to have everything cookie cutter
I heard that public companies listed on NYSE valued higher than similar companies listed in other countries. So at least some investors do care about the country.
A nice fantastical theory but kind of easy to poke holes in when Google and Facebook are recent trillion $ behemoths who's employees out-earned the capital of physical companies like US Steel and the spectrum of perpetually declining ATT.
It's just conspiracy mumbo jumbo. Google was running a private airport that used to be ran by NASA, definitely outsiders lmao.[1]
"At times, Google has appeared to get more out of the deal than the government. Before the fighter jet purchased by Brin, Page and Schmidt was ready to start collecting atmospheric data for NASA, Google executives had already turned Moffett into their corporate airport, flying into or out of the airfield nearly 600 times, according to FAA records.
As the executives’ use of the airfield became increasingly controversial, NASA initially appears to have rejected their efforts to extend the deal beyond 2014. The space agency even explored the possibility of handing off Moffett Field to another government agency or a municipality. But members of the community and powerful Google allies in Congress intervened to lobby against such a move. In the end, NASA awarded a 60-year lease to a Google affiliate over a competing bid from a development firm that sought to open up the facility to more flights and outside tenants. "
The truth is simpler, whoever has money can get influence and power and use it until they lose it, and the outcomes we see are a result of these complex interactions of many actors with their own incentives.
„Not paper wealth, but physical assets like land, steel, etc…“
I’m not saying I agree but the argument was that those unicorns (or behemoths) are just managing actual wealth - which is rooted in real, physical things not made up digital „money“.
At least that is how I understood GP
Of course I did. An $80 billion yearly profit stream is not “paper wealth.” Every year they could’ve bought ten US Steel, so who is managing who?
If you don’t believe in the value of digital money, only “real, physical things”, by all means only own cars and tools, and buy your meals with gold bars.
That’s true but it’s not as controversial or incendiary as you described it
The assets are in US banks onshore, despite the master fund being in the Cayman Islands, this reality is not only palatable to brainwashed patriots, it is also tantamount to the markets that the US created and liquidity the US succeeded in doing that 2nd place trails at.
There’s clearly an association between randomly applied old-fashioned noun capitalization and conspiracy theorizing. Everybody in this scene does it, from Trump on down.
Is it just because Capitals make things seem more Important and Ominous? As in this post, where the Elites control not just paper Assets but also the Fertilizer.
Since it’s only 9am UTC, and thus still the middle of the night for the US, perhaps the poster is a native practitioner of German Noun Capitalization?
Currently the rest of the replies exist in the gamut from merely tangential to extremely obtuse misreadings, which makes me wonder to what degree LLM-driven automation is involved.
They usually are. Even a couple centuries ago, a lot of Europe’s elites back then didn’t even speak the language of their own country on a daily basis - they preferred French. The culture of their own country was often something they knew relatively little about. Also, they felt much stronger allegiance to the pan-European league of aristocrats, than to their own country. That’s the dynamics of having mega-wealth I guess.
Unicorns that actually benefit people or just bullshit extractive tech? Show me the list. If I want to get less bullshit extractive tech maybe we should tighten up immigration?
x% of Startups in the US were founded by foreign workers statistics is needed to show that this is lower or higher than average.
Also, capital per startup or other factors could show why the percentage of success is plausibly higher or lower.
Over twice that proportion founding startups sounds very significant. It's not too surprising though - if you're able and willing to take the risk of migrating for work, you're probably more likely to be able and willing to start a company.
Disclaimer: I am not American. I have spent a total of 3 years in American corporate colonies in my country, and probably 3 times as much operating at various roles in local startups, many of which had major American funding.
I observe that even for the most capable Americans, operating a startup is at best a phase. Across the general public, it is not considered prestigious vocation. Of course, academic stars can do so, but very often that's as a side gig (unlike Big Tech, which is a valid extension of one's academic career). And for people who could both work in tech and e.g. finance, working in tech is the odd choice.
Since founding is premised on operating and having operating experience, a direct corollary is that extraordinary circumstances are needed for an American to be a participating founder (as opposed to e.g., throwing in the funding).
P.S.: Even if they are "special", the sheer size of the US leads to an abundance of indigenous founders. It's just that in my society, being a founder is a universally aspired role, whereas this appears not to be the case for US-born Americans.
This is not a difference in countries but in the age of money in the family line and what parents tell kids they should value. There's a natural transition from doing well at business in one generation to then shift the family focus to policy be it in politics, philanthropy, or technical (mostly law and finance) roles of prestige in the bureaucracy (ie SEC, district attorney office) which are roles that you can swing for if you don't care about money. If the kids revolt against this they'll do the same low reward / high prestige move except they'll try to impress their friends instead of their family, and go into art.
The mid-20th century completely hollowed out American culture, and immigrants benefit from not having been exposed to that. The people who invented the internet now need a stream of Indians and Chinese to run it so they can share instas.
