

Donald Trump Calls Out Mark Zuckerberg on Immigration - TheSMG
http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/17/news/companies/donald-trump-mark-zuckerberg-immigration/index.html

======
no1youknowz
Here is a simple solution.

Want more minorities, women, men who are either unskilled, unemployed and want
to work, get back into work?

Have companies work with the colleges, universities and have the right
teachers training the skills companies want in people to hire.

Then cancel, yes cancel all the H1Bs and ask them nicely to leave. Make it a
offense for companies to hire undocumented workers. Put that CEO/Business
owner in jail.

Then lower taxes.

You'll see a net benefit of those out of work whoever they are (black, white,
latino, asian - all US citizen). Either go back to school, get into employment
or start a business.

You'll see companies start hiring actual American people to get back to work.

Tax receipts will go up. The welfare state will actually go down, drastically.
Less social programs and the deficit may actually go down. Students may
actually start to pay back Student loans, by being in work.

The flow of money will stop being sent abroad, will actually go back into the
towns, cities where it belongs.

Remember. Companies employ local people. Those local people need services.
Those services pay for cleaners, cab drivers, waiters/waitresses, all these
types of jobs. Taxes also go to the city and pay for lots of other jobs.

It's like an eco-system. Look at when JKF lowered taxes.

I remember reading somewhere, CEO's were getting tax breaks because jobs were
going off-shore. This is crazy. They should get bonuses for having American
Employees. They should be in prison for going off-shore. How many towns/cities
in the US have been destroyed by CEOs for profit?

------
notsony
There are plenty of experienced software engineers, aged 40+, many with
families, who could do the jobs that Zuckerberg & co. want done.

We hear a lot about diversity, but nothing about AGE. Why is that?

~~~
TheSMG
I'm sure Zuck and those like him would argue its because engineers over 40
just aren't a good "cultural fit" in today's tech companies.

~~~
hwstar
It's more like we're too "wise" to work 80 hour weeks in perpetuity.

Yes, we learned that moderation is keeps things in balance, and we are going
to choose not to work in that kind of environment.

------
davidf18
The tech companies should report how many software engineers of various age
groups they employ and also should report how many people with H-1B visas they
employ.

~~~
vskarine
by law they report a lot of things, you can use this to search through:
[http://www.myvisajobs.com/Search_Visa_Sponsor.aspx](http://www.myvisajobs.com/Search_Visa_Sponsor.aspx)

------
thephyber
Trump's policy sounds like affirmative action for US citizens.

Yes, the H1-B visa system need to be policed so it's not used entirely to
drive down wages of local specialized employees. I'm under no allusions that
foreign H1-B workers have any right to work in the US, but neither do
unemployed US citizens -- which is what Trump is advocating. This is blatant
pandering to those working class voters who have been forced out of the US
economy for macroeconomic reasons. Trump's message is for the working class,
despite the fact that he is specifically talking about the H1-B program in
this instance.

In any case, Trump has no evidence that he will be capable of lobbying
Congress better than corporations do. He even complains in his immigration
policy document[1] that "Completion of a visa tracking system – required by
law but blocked by lobbyists" has allowed foreign citizens to overstay their
visas.

A vote for Trump is a vote to show frustration with the current political
system, not a vote to fix the current political system.

For anyone who wants a radically different idea from a presidential candidate,
look towards Lawrence Lessig[2].

[1] [https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-
reform](https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform)

[2] [https://www.yahoo.com/politics/who-is-lawrence-lessig-and-
wh...](https://www.yahoo.com/politics/who-is-lawrence-lessig-and-why-is-he-
running-for-126512471106.html)

*edit to clarify the "working class" reference, despite the article not touching on working class.

~~~
pcurve
That's a pretty harsh statement.

It's hard for average American IT workers to compete with H1B when many of
latter carpool, share houses, and are willing to work for less.

Sure they pay income taxes, but over $22 billion gets remitted to india from
U.S. That's remittance of after tax wage alone. Total IT expenditure is likely
in the hundreds of billions if you include Indian subcontracting firms, u.s.
investment in India, etc.

Look, I don't like Donald Trump. I also recognize there are many talented H1B
out there that play vital role. But current implementation of H1B is
completely broken.

A lot of H1B positions in the U.S. has nothing to do with U.s companies'
global competitiveness, because many of them are employed in service sectors
like insurance companies.

------
gizi
We no longer live in the industrial era in which workers were pretty much
interchangeable. Workers are not interchangeable at all. Zuckerberg has
already hired everybody in the USA whom he deems suitable. If he cannot import
the additional people whom he believes to be suitable, he will simply have to
put his engineering shop there where these people are; just like IBM has
already done.

~~~
davidf18
> Zuckerberg has already hired everybody in the USA whom he deems suitable.

First you have evidence of this statement I assume.

Moreover, Google has opened a very large office in NYC in one of the very
largest office buildings in the city. Facebook, (and Amazon and Microsoft and
Apple) have much smaller offices for engineering staff.

When Facebook and other firms replicates Google's efforts in NYC, I might
become more convinced that "Zuckerberg has already hired ...."

------
argumentum
Trump's position paper on immigration is by and large an appeal to the worst
nativist sentiments lurking across the political spectrum [1]. Read on balance
it is a call to end the very idea of America as a land of opportunity for
aspiring people around the world, _yearning to be free_.

His H1B spiel has to be understood in that context .. it's fine to discuss if
the program is abused. It's fine to criticize mass immigration, to maintain
security, to advocate reasonable limits on the _rate_ of immigration so as to
not overburden social services etc. But what he is doing is pitting aggrieved
minorities against each other, peddling the lie that "foreigners are stealing
your jobs" to the worse off, and "foreigners are stealing your taxes" to the
better off.

Quite honestly, Trump was winning me over in many ways before this. We do have
too much political correctness, it's great that someone is speaking against
special interests, we should make better international deals, we were stupid
to arm rebel armies in the middle east etc. In most of his speeches he had
come out in support of legal immigration, but looks like he has gone full
nativist now. Too bad, he just lost my vote.

If his policies are implemented, we will destroy what PG eloquently describes
below [2].

 _There is such a thing as Americanness. There 's nothing like living abroad
to teach you that. And if you want to know whether something will nurture or
squash this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus group than
hackers, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it.
Closer, probably, than the men running our government, who for all their talk
of patriotism remind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin than Thomas Jefferson or
George Washington.

When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound
more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote,
"is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive."

Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an
outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers have
embarrassed generations of their less confident successors. They remind us
where we come from. They remind us that it is the people who break rules that
are the source of America's wealth and power._

[1] [https://www.donaldjtrump.com/images/uploads/Immigration-
Refo...](https://www.donaldjtrump.com/images/uploads/Immigration-Reform-
Trump.pdf)

[2] [http://paulgraham.com/gba.html](http://paulgraham.com/gba.html)

------
rebootthesystem
If we want to survive and grow as a nation we need to become a nation of
entrepreneurs. We need to get back to a moment in time when that was part of
our DNA and people were hell-bent to make things happen. The kind of drive
that resulted in this nation is gone today, the vast majority of us are
neutered versions of what we could have been or should become.

By promoting the message that we can't create businesses, innovate and grow
the economy without importing talent (through H1B's and other programs) we
are, at the same time, telling our own population "you are useless in the new
economy and nothing whatsoever will come from you". Which, of course, couldn't
be farther from the truth.

If we don't have enough tech talent from within it can only be because we have
failed to develop it. And this, in turn, is due to many factors, some
straightforward some not so much, some common sense, structural, cultural,
financial and political.

Yes, there's a lot of fix. And no, professional politicians are not going to
be able to do it.

Why? Because the fitness function of a politician is wrong for a long term
approach to solving difficult problems. Problems that might require pissing
off loads of people in the interest of emerging in a better position at the
end of the process. Sometimes in chess you have to sacrifice your queen to win
the game many moves later. The naive player isn't comfortable with such a
sacrifice. It takes a good teacher (and experience) to learn why that might be
a good move.

The right thing to do is to launch a massive effort to make our population the
most entrepreneurial and technical people on the planet. And that's not easy.
And that will take a lot of effort and time.

Politicians, due to the nature of their fitness function, cannot and will not
do this. The moves they'd have to make are career-ending in the context of
having to survive elections every two, four or six years. Adapting to natural
selection, for their kind, takes the form of pandering for votes during
campaigns and laying low until the next election.

Few pay the price for not accomplishing anything of note. In fact, while in
tech we are lauded for trying, failing, pivoting, again and again and again
until we succeed, in professional politics a single failure can end a career.
And so doing nothing at all is better than trying.

One could very well argue that the politician fitness function isn't really
optimized for the benefit of anyone but the politician and the ecosystem or
tribe they belong to. This is THE huge problem with the idea of having a
professional political class. They are rarely good for anything other than
getting themselves from election to election. Some do nothing in between, some
create problems and a lucky few are in office through economic booms they had
nothing to do with yet are quick to take credit for when elections come-up.
The politician is a parasitic organism with few benefits.

I've always thought this country needed to make a shift from being ruled (yes,
ruled) by a professional political class to being governed by term-limited
representatives with "skin in the game" and consequences attached to
performance at various levels. And, yes, I really think that in the age of
technology and global commerce and at a time when we are about to step into 20
trillion dollars in foreign debt we need tough-as-nails business people at the
helm. The guy (or gal) who only cares about surviving elections WILL NOT FIX
OUR PROBLEMS. EVER.

I firmly believe we are living a moment in time when if we do not get our
education, finances, economy and our industrial base in order nothing else
will matter over time. We can't think ourselves invincible. We can't think we
are going to last forever. We have to work to maintain position in the world
and we have to make the right decisions. We have to EARN IT, others, China,
will not give us or grant us our position. We earn it or we suffer a
fundamental negative change in our standing in the world with the concomitant
changes this would entail.

By the time the next president takes office we would have utterly wasted eight
to fifty years (you pick the term, it doesn't matter) doing nothing,
accomplishing nothing and actually going backwards in many respects. Fixing
this will be a tall order. It will be far worst than it was eight to ten years
go. And it will most definitely be a business problem.

I am not suggesting Trump is the right person for the job. He may very well
be. I don't know. What I am saying is that other than him and Fiorina I don't
see anyone else on either party who is truly qualified to deal with the kinds
of problems we will have to content with. If you close your eyes and listen to
what all the candidates say all the professional politicians sound exactly the
same and say pretty much the same things. Their alignment is with themselves
and their careers, not the difficult road ahead, one that will require very
tough decisions across the board.

So, yes, I think H1B's can be seen as a problem. Yet, we have many more to
deal with. Each a piece of the overall puzzle. If we can't graduate good
technicians, engineers and scientists at greater rates from within we might as
well hand over the keys and call it done.

~~~
PhilWright
Utter garbage.

