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American-born employees to fill the roles at many tech companies.
Researchers have found that more than enough students graduate from
American colleges to fill available tech jobs. Critics of the industry’s friendliness toward immigrants say it comes down to money — that
technology companies take advantage of visa programs, like the H-1B
system, to get foreign workers at lower prices than they would pay American-born ones.

But if that criticism rings true in some parts of the tech industry, it
misses the picture among Silicon Valley’s top companies. One common misperception of Silicon Valley is that it operates like a factory; in
that view, tech companies can hire just about anyone from anywhere in
the world to fill a particular role.

But today’s most ambitious tech companies are not like factories.
They’re more like athletic teams. They’re looking for the LeBrons and Bradys — the best people in the world to come up with some brand-new, never-before-seen widget, to completely reimagine what widgets should do
in the first place.

“It’s not about adding tens or hundreds of thousands of people into manufacturing plants,” said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and chief
executive of the cloud-storage company Box. “It’s about the couple ideas that are going to be invented that are going to change everything.”

Why do tech honchos believe that immigrants are better at coming up with
those inventions? It’s partly a numbers thing. As the tech venture
capitalist Paul Graham has pointed out, the United States has only 5
percent of the world’s population; it stands to reason that most of the world’s best new ideas will be thought up by people who weren’t born here.

If you look at some of the most consequential ideas in tech, you find an unusual number that were developed by immigrants. For instance, Google’s entire advertising business — that is, the basis for the vast majority
of its revenues and profits, the engine that allows it to hire thousands
of people in the United States — was created by three immigrants: Salar Kamangar and Omid Kordestani, who came to the United States from Iran,
and Eric Veach, from Canada.

But it’s not just a numbers thing. Another reason immigrants do so well
in tech is that people from outside bring new perspectives that lead to
new ideas.

Read more here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/technology/personaltech/why-silicon-valley-wouldnt-work-without-immigrants.html


Thank you,
Amine Moulay Ramdane.

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