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Like most things this is just people getting into semantics arguments, when they likely agree with each other.
The MAGA people: yes to high skilled immigration. Yes to operation paper clip, and draining the rest of the world of their geniuses.
The tech people: same.
But there is a contingent of people who, when they say “high skilled” mean: useless Indian code monkeys, “IT consultants” and the like. Anybody who has worked with these people has had the following experience:
They lie about their abilities
They’re rude
They lie about when things are going to be finished
The work they do produce is low quality
This also does seem to be something unique to whatever system Indian uses to educate its population. It also seems to be demonstrated by the fact that India, despite supposedly being full of “high skilled” tech workers, hasn’t produced any high tech companies. There is no Indian OpenAI, spacex, Tesla, Google etc.
When the MAGA right hears “H1B” or “high skilled tech workers”, this is what they’re thinking of. They’re fine with Werner Von Braun coming here. They don’t want an endless stream of people who are claiming to have skills they don’t have, in fields where our own workers are apparently struggling to find work (although I doubt the truth of that as well: tl;dr skill issue).
Nowhere other than the US and (to a much lesser extent) a handful of East Asian nations (China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan) have produced major tech companies. China only produced them because of local ownership rules and heavy state backing. Japan and Korea have big hardware companies but are bad at software, Taiwan got lucky with chips but has little else.
So really it’s the US and China.
There are kind of too many to list that disprove your point. Germany has BMW, festo/festool, SAP, Siemens, etc etc. England has rolls Royce and BAE, and honestly countless others. France has Dassalt, Ariane, and Airbus.
I mean it honestly just goes on and on.
My point is that India is implying a radical claim, that their country is uniquely full of highly desirable high tech genius workers. France, England, Germany, etc. aren’t making that claim and yet they appear to have high tech companies.
China could make that claim, and if they did it would be valid. China has tons of high tech companies (although some might claim it is stolen technology, but whatever).
India has no high tech companies, and it seems to follow that since they have a high population and still not innovative companies, they must be uniquely bad at innovation. There should be VERY FEW (if any?) Indians coming to the US on the claim that there is no America alternative.
That isn’t the case. It seems like something else is going on.
How are BMW or BAE the equivalent of Google or Amazon? The former are legacy industrial manufacturers, akin to Ford or Lockheed.
I Amazon is the yard-stick you are measuring by, the US (with Apple and Amazon) and South Korea (with Samsung) are pretty much the only games in town.
FAANG is dead, long live AAS.
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