Chicken Or Egg?

Source: AP

Cue the violins! It appears that without an endless tsunami flood of immigrants there would be no businesses in America and we'll be living in huts and eating bugs (mmmm, bugs, so crispy, so delicious)...

Foreign-born entrepreneurs were behind one in four U.S. technology startups over the past decade, according to a study to be published Thursday.

A team of researchers at Duke University estimated that 25 percent of technology and engineering companies started from 1995 to 2005 had at least one senior executive — a founder, chief executive, president or chief technology officer — born outside the United States.

Immigrant entrepreneurs' companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in sales in 2005, according to the survey.

Nothing here I necessarily disagree with, the point I want to make here is a little subtler, let's dig deeper into this article...

"The advantage of entrepreneurs is that they're generally creating new opportunities and new wealth that didn't even exist before them," Saxenian said. "Just by leaving your home country, you're taking a risk, and that means you're willing to take risks in business. You put them in an environment that supports entrepreneurship, and this is the logical outcome."

And what is that environment? Could it be...America! So the chicken or egg question is this: is it immigrants who benefit America, or, America that benefits immigrants?

Obviously to some degree the answer is both, of course. But the way the argument is framed these days through the "Three Monkey Media" is that America would wither away and die, not without immigration, but without an endless flood of immigration.

Now, the implication is that we will lose our competitiveness if we don't import every one of these individuals, could be true, or could be true that it's the simple fact of coming here that makes the immigrant competitive.

Or are there tons of tech start ups from India that I'm unaware of? Thought not.

And of course Econ 101 teaches us about the law of supply and demand, wouldn't importing a vast number of anything by definition drive wages down?

Of course articles like this have a tendency to generate non sequitors...

Saxenian, also co-author of the new study, said the research debunks the notion that immigrants who come to the United States take jobs from Americans.

Huh?

Now we get to the actual meaning of this article, have you guesses what season it is yet?

It's H1-B visa season! (how nice of our lapdog compliant media to shill for the high tech plantation owners!)

"People who come from India are laser-focused on technology," said Rosen Sharma, who immigrated from India in 1993 and is now president and chief executive officer of Palo Alto-based management software company SolidCore Systems Inc. "They come here and they learn to tell a story and paint a vision. Once you have those two things, you're off to the races."

Or, to quote Billy Gates "Send me some more goddamn cheap Indian coders!"

Technorati Tags: immigration, high tech, India, h1-b visa, high tech plantations, three monkey media