
Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups - mavelikara
http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-18760
======
dalke
In a slightly older thread concerning this topic, at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11306290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11306290)
I made some objections to this analysis.

I think there's a fundamental problem in how to interpret this analysis. It
says that a company is founded by an immigrant if there is at least one
immigrant founder. This means that if 1 of 10 founders is foreign born, then
it classified as immigrant founded. An aggregate calculation like this is very
likely to give a number which is higher than the more important number, the
over- or under- representation of immigrant founders relative to the immigrant
population.

For example, if every company has 10 founders, and every company has 1
immigrant founder, then by the given definition, 100% of the companies would
be founded by an immigrant. However, only 10% of the founder population would
be an immigrant. As immigrants make up about 13% of the US population, this
would mean that immigrants would be proportionally _less likely_ to be
founders of $1B valuated startups than non-immigrants.

Curiously, and I believe significantly, the study does not give this
population information, and it makes it difficult to determine that ratio.

I did not find an explicit count of the number of immigrant founders. Table 4
has a list of all of the name, and Table 3 has a count of immigrants from a
given country, so it's possible to figure this out. I am perturbed that the
first contains 60 people and the second 61. Perhaps I have miscounted, but I
believe there is an error in the report. (I double checked the report by
searching for "60" or "61", but found no explicit total of the number of
immigrant founders.)

I did not find an explicit count of the total number of founders, which means
I have to compute that myself from the list of companies. I did not find an
explicit list of companies, which means I have to go to the original WSJ data
source.

Which I did, though my count was off by one from the report's count. It would
have been much better if the report included the explicit list of companies
_and_ founder counts.

I took the current WSJ list of 106 companies and picked a few in the top,
middle, and bottom range. (Statistical sampling would have been better, I
know.) I found founder counts of 65 of them before tedium kicked in. I found
161 founders.

This gives an estimated total founder size of 161/65x87 = 215.5, and implies
that about 60/215.5 = 28% of founders are immigrants.

This number, while twice as large as expected from the general immigrant
population of the US, is also around half of the eye-catching 51%.

The next step would be to do a sensitivity analysis to give an idea of error
bars. I do not know anything beyond basic statistics, but will point out that
60 is a very small number compared to the number of foreign visa, and hardly
representative.

Speaking of statistics, while 28% is twice as large as 13%, there's likely
also a form of p-hacking, or "garden of forking paths" going on. With enough
sampling, you will be able to find very unrepresentative subgroups in your
data. Why was this population of $1B startups chosen? Do the results change
with $2B? Do they change for companies that go public?

For a more specific example, last year there was an analysis going around
which pointed out that "Most high tech companies are founded by founded by
First/2nd gen immigrants". This is definitely in the same vein, though with
different measures. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085970)
for my observation that this is almost exactly what you would expect given the
immigrant population in the US.

Since I can point to two reports related to the topic, how many more negative
and thus unpublished correlations are there?

Finally, the report includes the suggestion that diversity among the founders
helps improve the success of the company. If that were the case, then should
we not exclude companies where the all founders are from the same foreign
country, as in Nutanix where all three founders are from India?

~~~
jmspring
I'm jaded. But stories like this are planned to divert to things like what IBM
are doing or job shops like Tata,etc.

"Oh look at what immigrants are contributing in entrepreneurial sense, but
ignore how big companies are moving jobs overseas."

IBM and Disney, iconic US brands are at the for front of outsourcing local
jobs using H1B scabs as the route.

~~~
winter_blue
Well, there are two groups of companies. Companies that can't find the talent
that they need in this country, and companies trying to save money.

There definitely is a STEM shortage, and you are being really dishonest if you
say there isn't. Ask any hiring manager at a tech company. Facebook,
Microsoft, Google, and many, many other companies _do not_ underpay or
maltreat their visa-holding employees in any way. It is primarily this class
of companies that are asking for an expansion in the number of visas.

Several bills have been introduced in Congress that would have (further)
restricted the ability of the less-nice companies to underpay immigrants or
displace native-born workers. For example, S.744 from the 113th Congress.

It is wrong to paint all companies with the same brush.

~~~
dalke
No, there is _not_ a STEM shortage because "STEM" is a nonsense term. The
companies you mentioned don't want to hire anthropologists, general relativity
theorists, large animal biologists, nuclear power engineers, differential
geometry experts, meteorologists, pharmaceutical chemists, or most of the
other diverse fields in STEM.

No, the shortage is only in from a much smaller subset of primarily
programming related skills.

If there were a real shortage, FB and others would start their own training
program, give people scholarships to attend for a year and get up to speed,
then hire the best candidates from that pool. We are nowhere near there
because it's cheaper to get people to pay for their own education (or get the
government to pay for it), and hire from that.

Historical, that's similar to what happened when there were real labor
shortages. After all, it's not like all the women welders during WWII came in
knowing how to weld.

~~~
winter_blue
The idea that good programmers are as easily trainable as good welders is
ridiculous. If that were the case, we wouldn't have a shortage.

My company actually does try to train people. We hire people who come out of
coding camps like General Assembly -- and we _actually pay these camps_ when
we hire them. Students attend these camps for free.

After that, we pair program with them, and painstakingly explain various
concepts to them. We hold them by the hand, and _literally teach them_. I
found it amazing that my company had to do this, and shocking that they
literally could not find good developers. My company is just looking for
developers _that can get shit done_. We are not looking for rock stars, or
master algorithm puzzle solvers. Just people who can build decent, functioning
non-broken software.

FYI, I graduated very recently with a B.S. in Computer Science, and my total
comp (incl. bonuses) is slightly over $150,000. And, at my company, the
typical workday is from 10 am to 6 pm. _I am not over-worked, or under-paid_.

It is clear that you've neither been in a position of hiring developers, nor
have an idea of what good programming skill is.

~~~
dalke
That explains why you have so little knowledge of labor history that you don't
know what a "scab", is nor know of the strikes by people in a STEM field. You
have neither the training nor the experience.

What you might take from that is that, while you are neither "over-worked, or
under-paid", you are under-educated about history, and more specifically labor
history.

Your last line continues your tiring practice of name calling. Please stop.

~~~
winter_blue
> practice of name calling

There is a time and place for everything. When a person makes remarks that are
beyond a shadow of doubt hateful and xenophobic, naming those things
(specifically) and calling them out is absolutely the right thing to do.

It would be morally wrong, cowardly, and reprehensibly politically correct
_not to do so_.

Jesus said to the Pharisees: "You snakes, you brood of vipers, how will you
escape being condemned to hell?"

So, _no_ , I absolutely will not stop speaking the truth, and naming and
calling out _evil_ when I see it.

I have experienced an incredible amount of hate here. You hate me and despise
me because I immigrated to this country (that too, legally). Your hatred and
your contempt is based solely on the fact that I wasn't born here.

You believe that I deserve a lesser shot at life, and fewer rights and
freedoms than you have, simply because I wasn't born here.

That is a disgusting, contemptible, elitist, and entitled set of beliefs.
Especially considering that the families of most people in this country
immigrated in the last few hundred years.

You and your ilk are a shame and a disgrace to this country, like the KKK. You
do not embody the American spirit. Nor do you understand the values and
principles this country was founded on. Specifically, you and your ilk embody
the spirit of Andrew Jackson, and not that of Abraham Lincoln.

~~~
dalke
And what of your professed morality gives you the right to say that I don't
"have an idea of what good programming skill is"? What evidence justifies that
name calling? Or do you justify it because you have concluded I am the
despised Enemy who deserves no better?

It's easy to dress yourself in the clothes of righteousness. The feeling of
moral outrage is powerful. But your call to "ich kann nicht anders", used so
profoundly by Martin Luther King Jr. while in the Birmingham jail, no more
justifies your conclusion than it might justify King's namesakes' 'Von den
Juden und ihren Lügen'.

I tell you again _I AM AN IMMIGRANT_. _MY FATHER WAS AN IMMIGRANT_. Your shots
are clearly wild and disconnected from reality. You appear to believe that
anyone who disagrees with you in the slightest is "beyond a shadow of doubt
hateful and xenophobic".

Isn't life so clear when you live in a absolutist world of black&white world,
and work on the side of Jesus? Too bad for you that that's not the real world.
Nor is it world I aspire towards. I don't want to be subject to the whims of
people who ignore evidence counter to their conclusions.

------
staunch
These are not the downtrodden masses. Immigrant does not mean poor. These are
wealthy upper class people coming to the most logical place to create a
successful technology company, because they can afford to do so. Poor people
are usually stuck wherever they are.

Investors in Silicon Valley care a lot about status and pedigree. A foreigner
that can afford elite credentials is far more likely to get funding than a
poor local.

And of course H1B visas drive down wages. This is basic supply and demand.

~~~
ra1n85
Are you sure H1B visas are relevant here? I would imagine EB-5 (investment)
visas would be the more common route for upper class immigrant entrepreneurs
coming to the US.

~~~
GuiA
Not quite so sure. I was a startup cofounder (never made it to billion dollar
though :), and came to the US via grad school on an F1 visa, which then
morphed into an H1B, and am now in the process of getting a green card.

I know this is a very common path.

Regarding the class thing: my grandparents were blue collar workers who never
went to high school, my parents were engineers.

~~~
chrisper
IANAL, but you cannot legally work on your own startup if you are on H1B

~~~
ojbyrne
You can be a "co-founder" of a funded startup though. As long as the company
has enough financial backing to prove they can pay you a market wage, and you
meet the other requirements.

~~~
chrisper
Oh, that makes sense!

------
pandaman
The article is advocating for increasing H1-B caps. I wonder what does H1-B (a
non-immigrant visa, which does not allow running your own business) has to do
with immigrants founding billion dollar startups other than them using it to
acquire cheap labor?

~~~
belltaco
Because many of them came to the US to study because of being able to work
here through the OPT/H1/GreenCard/citizen route. Same with many top
professors, researchers and tech execs like Nadella, Gundotra, Pichai etc.And
many people on this list too like the inventor of USB etc.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_Americans](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_Americans)

~~~
ori_b
> Same with many top professors, researchers and tech execs like Nadella,
> Gundotra, Pichai etc.And many people on this list too like the inventor of
> USB etc.

Some of them might have, but the H1B is an _awful_ avenue for this. You are
not allowed any side businesses while you are employed on an H1B visa (and you
can't be self employed using it). If you are Indian, you are looking at what
is currently an 11 year processing delay before you can get a green card, not
counting the time it takes to get your H1B initially. If you're from other
countries, the backlog is shorter, but it is still multiple years before you
can leave your company to try self employment.

Assuming you get approved for a green card. It's possible to get an H1B and
then get denied for a green card.

Academics and other similar figures of note can already apply directly for a
green card, which I suspect many of the people on this list have done. If you
want to expand immigration, a simpler, faster path to permanent residency is
essential.

~~~
klipt
> If you want to expand immigration, a simpler, faster path to permanent
> residency is essential.

Comprehensive immigration reform was supposed to do that, adopting a more
streamlined points system like Canada and Australia, but of course the bill
ended up covering amnesty for undocumented immigrants too and the whole thing
got shot down.

Unfortunately for most people an H1-B is the best path to a green card, and
only once you have a green card are you free to be an entrepreneur etc.

~~~
ori_b
Yes, as a Canadian working in the USA on an H1B, I am painfully aware of this
fact.

The point remains: Increasing the number of H1Bs will not have a great impact
on the number of founders, especially not in the short term, because the vast
majority of them will end up shackled to an employer for years.

~~~
davidw
The real reform would be to unshackle H1B's. Sadly, in today's political
climate, I don't think that's likely.

------
tinco
I'm not a U.S. citizen, and obviously one day I hope to be one of those U.S.
Billion-Dollar startup founders and I would appreciate a VISA if it would help
me achieve that, but there's something shaky with the premise here.

Why does the U.S. need to depend on the ~80.000 odd first order immigrants per
year to generate that amount of wealth. Couldn't the U.S. somehow draw those
ambitious out of its current population?

What if people could 'emigrate' from Detroit to California? They'd basically
be refugees from a low-opportunity environment as well.

Or is it not the fact that they came from a low-opportunity environment, but
rather that they came like Bill Gates from the tender love and care of
rich/succesful parents, and being born abroad was just a small hurdle?

~~~
xiaoma
When an Elon Musk or a Max Levchin shows up in your country itching to get to
work, the best course of action is _not_ to say, "couldn't we some how draw
your kind of ambition out of a local?"

Far better is to give them visas let them build in your country rather than
elsewhere.

~~~
taurath
The better option is to make sure that everyone in your country that has the
POTENTIAL to be an Elon Musk gets the education and skills they need to become
him. Elon went to many prestigious private schools and had early childhood
access to expensive computers, which is a common thread in MANY founders and
current executives and VCs in the startup world.

Meanwhile I know a lot of smart people who don't go to college in the US
because they don't want to be saddled with $100k in debt. And a lot more who
don't persue higher degrees because their parents aren't poor enough to
receive assistance but not rich enough to pay for college. We do a terrible
job of helping people in America live up to their potential - its the best
country to be born rich in, but the worst first-world country to be born poor
in.

~~~
zhemao
These are not mutually exclusive possibilities. You can accept highly skilled
immigrants AND improve your education system. If anything, doing the former
might make it easier to do the latter, since those highly skilled immigrants
will provide more tax revenue to spend on public education.

~~~
taurath
True enough, but companies only argue for more immigration (quicker fix) than
an educated populace (not their problem/criticism of govt is bad for business)

------
sonabinu
Most CS students want to come to the U.S. from around the world because the CS
Rock Stars are here! Where else are you able to go to a meet up and strike up
a conversation with the person who wrote popular software you admire? How
often do you get to do that in another country? The immigrants want to start
companies here because there are success stories here - especially immigrant
success stories. I love the CS classes here ... I love the passion that
students show, I love the side projects people are willing to invest free time
in ...

------
Dr_tldr
It's no secret that the continuing economic dominance of the US is not due to
a post-WW2 windfall or the unique capabilities of Americans, but more to the
ability of the US to attract and retain the very best, and then subsequently
give them unique opportunities.

Few nativists are opposed to the best and the brightest (and the already-
wealthy) coming to the US in very, very small numbers, but what they don't
realize is that it's pretty much impossible to tell in advance who's going to
be a winning lottery ticket.

~~~
aviwl
What factors do you think contribute to the ability of the US to attract the
best?

~~~
adventured
\- A culture that strongly promotes entrepreneurial activity and doesn't
lambast you for failing at starting a business.

\- Venture capital on every corner. Most new businesses are started with
capital from friends, family, or other local semi-well-off people (think: the
doctors etc. that helped fund Warren Buffett's first company with initial
investment). It's extremely common in the US, people don't find it strange.

\- Large scale venture capital, eg Silicon Valley or NY.

\- The best universities, by far. Beyond the concentration of talent that
places like Stanford or MIT have, the US produces immense amounts of research
and innovation from its top ~100 universities, which then frequently spin-off
into new businesses. Bill Gates has estimated that the US produces 1/2 of all
the scientific output on earth.

\- Very enshrined protections around freedom of speech, and freedom of the
press. This has been critical for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter,
MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Reddit, Digg, Blogger, Medium, Wordpress,
Movable Type, LiveJournal and a thousand others. Relatively strong property
rights protections also help.

\- An approach to creating new things that mostly says that things are legal
until or unless they're named to be illegal. Basically: do it, don't ask
permission. It's why PayPal, Uber and Airbnb were able to break the rules and
get away with it for so long. Despite the criticism you'll see of this on HN,
it's invaluable. Otherwise, you have a system where you must seek permission
for every single thing.

\- Common language, common currency and a mostly unified large market under
one federal system. Free movement between states allowing talent to go where
it needs / wants to. Starting in the US enables you to rush to scale much
faster than you can in almost any other market, a position of strength from
which you can then go after every other market.

\- Massive rewards. The US owns around 43% of all global wealth, with among
the highest median incomes, and the fifth highest GDP per capita - matched
with three hundred million people that have a high rate of consumer activity.
That enables very outsized results.

\- Extremely high productivity and high technology adoption across most
industries. The US economy remains among the top nations in terms of
productivity (as witnessed by its very high GDP per capita), despite its size.

\- Plentiful and relatively cheap energy / energy costs. The US is the world's
second largest manufacturer. If you need to make something physical in the US,
you can still do it for the most part.

------
Kenji
_According to the study, Mr. Bansal couldn’t leave his job to start a new
company because it was unclear if he’d be able to keep his H-1B status._

For 7 years. What a lock-in. And during that time, your employer can probably
abuse you and freeze your salary, knowing exactly that your stay depends on
that visa and you have a hard time leaving.

Another point on immigrants. The US does it right: It causes brain-drain in
other countries and actually takes in skilled workers. I can guarantee you
that the kind of mass immigration central Europe is experiencing right now
won't lead to an array of startups.

~~~
shas3
Funnily, due to country quotas that 7-9 yr wait on employment-based green
cards is almost exclusively Indian problem.

~~~
hibikir
Today, sure. 5 years ago, the EB2 and EB3 quotas for all other countries were
almost as long, but this changes over time. For instance, in 2007, the line
was 5 years after labor certification, so, in practice, about 6 years for
everyone.

Nowadays that to get an H1B you need to go through a lottery, the big Indian
outsources are increasing their percentage of H1Bs, making the problem both
harder for India, and easier for the rest of the world. Instead of waiting 5
or 6 years like I did, now you probably can't stay in the US, but if you can,
the green card is easier.

It's a downright bizarre situation.

------
mchahn
So those immigrants are taking all that VC money away from me!

(Kidding, kidding, kidding, just a Trump joke).

~~~
force_reboot
And yet this is what the majority of people in on HN are arguing here. So you
have to ask, why is a certain viewpoint laughable when applied to illegal
immigrants from South America, but reasonable when applied to H-1B visas?

~~~
netheril96
Because their interests are not hurt by illegal immigrants from South America,
but hurt by legal immigrants on H-1B visas.

------
convexfunction
1\. Many want it to be true that it's an objectively good idea to allow more
immigration, or for there to be a broad consensus that more immigration is
objectively good, or for there to be more ammunition to conduct moral
posturing upon the outgroup when the outgroup has negative valence about
immigration, or maybe two or all three. (I don't particularly disagree,
immigration is fine.)

2\. One great way to accomplish all of those is to create an association
between "immigrant" and "success" or "innovation" in people's minds.

3\. People gloss over the difference between P(A|B) and P(B|A) _all the time_.
If you can show that P(B|A) is surprisingly high, and there's sufficient
motivation to do so, people will instead think something much more like "A and
B are associated" than "A often implies B though not at all necessarily the
converse".

4\. So, just show that {thing you want people to have positive valence about}
is overrepresented in {tiny set of things with positive valence}. This will
probably be easy, since there are lots of tiny sets of things with positive
valence.

This strategy is far more used in the negative case -- "people who do bad
thing Y are often from group X, don't concern yourself with the base rate of
bad thing Y among all members of group X" \-- but either way it's very
effective and very insidious.

------
falsestprophet
"These 44 companies, the study says, are collectively valued at $168 billion
and create an average of roughly 760 jobs per company."

Firstly, that's 33,000 jobs or about 0.0003% of the US workforce, so hardly
the backbone of the economy.

Secondly, the H1B program, the subject of the article, is not an immigration
program but a guest worker program. Generally, H1B workers leave the country
and don't go on to start companies because the visa is limited to six years.

~~~
hibikir
Nope, the H1B visa is THE immigration program. Every university will tell you
that.

The route used to go like this: Studying in an American university will get
you an F1 visa, which gets you either a first job or an internship. Then, if
you are any good, the only sensible way for your employer to retain you is to
file for H1B. Back when I did it, it was really easy to get it (as opposed to
today's 1/3 lottery). At that point, you can say that you want a green card.
Nobody is going to be crazy enough to sponsor someone for a Green Card if they
aren't working there already, if just because it's a relatively long process
in the best of cases, and many years the worst. So we get H1Bs so that
companies will be OK sponsoring us. Once your green card process is pending,
the visa stops being limited: You just have to wait as many years as it might
take to get to the front of the green card queue. Then you will be approved,
and become a permanent resident.

Today, getting the H1B is actually HARDER than getting the green card, but
getting one first is pretty much mandatory due to the delays. This is what
makes the H1B the main road in. If you look at the employment based green
cards handed out every year, a very large percentage comes from H1s, or maybe
L1s(which only works in a company that has an international subsidiary)

There are H1Bs that go back home, but they are those that get laid off at the
wrong time, so they give up on the green card process.

~~~
cplanas
Good comment. Just a clarification: there is no path to the Green Card from
L1B. There is a path from L1A, but I would guess they are a minority of the L1
visas.

So yes, H1 seems to be the one and only skilled immigration program.

------
frandroid
> These 44 companies, the study says, are collectively valued at $168 billion
> and create an average of roughly 760 jobs per company in the U.S.

$168B divided by 760 employees: $220M of value created per job.

If there's no error in the numbers, that means that employees at these
startups are tremendously underpaid, in spite of probably making above-market
salaries.

~~~
gjkood
Isn't the number 760 employees PER company? That would make the total as
760*44=33,440 employees.

~~~
hanniabu
Correct. That comes down to $5M per employee, which is still pretty damn good
by my standards

------
eva1984
Not on a serious note...this title could be phrased as 'With no immigrants
flooding, americans will found 100% of U.S. Billion-Dollar startups'

~~~
BWStearns
"Immigrants Stealing 51% of Best Paying Jobs"

This game is fun!

------
Nutmog
The arbitrary criteria for deciding what companies to include shows they could
have just searched for one (valued at over $1B at 2016-01-01 and not publicly
traded) that gives the most favorable result. Why $1B? Why not $10B, $100M, or
$1 million? Why 2016? Why not 2015 or any time in the past decade or two? Why
not listed companies? Is that so they can call them "startups", or is it
because $1B+ listed companies are mostly founded by American born people?

I couldn't find any mention of their methodology for selecting criteria in the
linked report. Without that, the only conclusion seems to be "water is wet".
This doesn't look like science. It looks like politics and is inherent
dishonesty.

------
tim333
They could do with a startup founder visa really. Maybe allow people to hang
out and launch companies for a year or 2 and allow conversion to a long term
visa if they employ a few Americans. Bit like a relaxed version of the E2
visa.

Edit - I read to the bottom of the article and see they tried to bring
something like that in with the "EB-JOBS Act of 2015" which didn't get through
the political system.

~~~
jbotttt
This already exists in the EB-5 visa[0] assuming you start with .5 million
funding. You get to stay forever too.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa)

~~~
NhanH
EB-5 visa requires $1 million funding. .5 million is for "Targeted Employment
Area", which is basically area with bad economy, you really don't want to
start a startup there.

------
ekianjo
There aren't many Billion Dollar startups out there (44 as said in the
article) so the apparently precise percentage (51%) is slightly misleading
(base size is small so not so representative). If they had looked at, let's
say, 500M startups, the actual figure would have been more telling.

------
thetruthseeker1
No matter how you feel about the whole legal immigration thing, If it is true
that immigrants who form significantly less than 51% of the working population
found 51% of the startups there is an interesting insight statistically
speaking (This is not normal, but good)

May be there needs to be a distinction between the kind of immigrants who go
on to found startups vs the one who come to take low paying jobs. May be
create different visa category for each. Encourage one discourage
another(limiting it), but that doesn't mean that every person who comes under
1st category starts a company or everybody who comes under the second category
doesn't start a company.

I see it as math, maximize one function and minimize the other.

------
jcuga
What good is a billion dollar startup if it pays little US tax, and only
employs one or two hundred high paying jobs? A 100 Million dollar company
typically employs just as many high paying jobs and may pay more US tax than a
lot of these tech companies.

Also, a lot of these tech companies that are "shaking up" industries are
profitable at the expense of other more traditional businesses (For example:
AirBnB taking business from Hotels, Uber from taxi services, etc).

So bringing in more Billion dollar unicorn startups may not be the best thing
for a country.

~~~
wallawe
> What good is a billion dollar startup if it pays little US tax?

Your line of thought implies that the only way a company can add value to the
economy is through employment and taxes. You only need to look for a couple
seconds at the mess in DC to glimpse how much money from taxes is wasted, not
to mention allocated towards ethically questionable activities (drones,
domestic spying, wars, etc). That's for another conversation.

In the case of airbnb, you are taking money from larger more established
corporations (hotel chains) and giving it to homeowners who have a spare
bedroom or are away for the weekend. You are also providing a wider range of
pricing options for consumers. So the company contributes to the economy in
those ways as well, not just through employment and taxes.

> Also, a lot of these tech companies that are "shaking up" industries are
> profitable at the expense of other more traditional businesses

These companies take business from traditional companies because they _provide
more value_. Keep in mind the whole point of a company to fulfill a need. I
would say that it's not really up to you or anyone other than consumers to
decide if it's a good thing or not that these companies succeed. Competition
is always a good thing for consumers.

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whybroke
tldr; WSJ want to raise H1B cap and cherry-picks/mis-represents data to
justify that.

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flurben
The study found that 51 percent of the country’s $1 billion startup companies
had at least one immigrant founder.

To say that "immigrants founded 51% of U.S. billion-dollar startups" seems a
bit misleading to me.

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nativedude
We're talking theses United States right?! So unless you're talking 'bout
Native Americans then 99%+ of all companies since 1776 have been created by
Immigrants. Think about folks!

~~~
notworthmyjob
If so, how did us Europeans "immigrating" to the US work out for the Native
Americans?

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nickpsecurity
What was thd class of the inmigrant? Where did they go to school? And were
those that funded them immigrants?

Then the big picture emerges.

~~~
eru
I don't know about the US, but in Britain a lot of university funding comes
from charging foreigners an arm and a leg to study there.

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hackaflocka
Pretty sure white immigrants like Elon Musk are not who Donald Trump and his
followers are talking about.

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known
Never let your inferiors do you a favor. It'll be extremely costly;

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vpkaihla
49% of US billion-dollar startups were founded by native americans?

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chetanahuja
Clicked this expecting to see much breast-beating about H1B and "driving down
wages". Top comment has this:

 _" And of course H1B visas drive down wages"_

Wasn't disappointed. Never change hacker news.

~~~
jza00425
xenophobia is big part of this myth. in the future, mail wife will be the only
way to get into US

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SCAQTony
Immigrants are awesome and unfortunately exploited but don't you think an
orderly immigration is far more effective than having borders Zerg rushed?

