I was reading this article on Business Week a while ago – it argues US should make it easier for skilled immigrants to settle down here, and that argument is backed by well-researched data.
Anyways, what caught my attention was a comment posted by one of its readers, someone named “Steve”. He says “I would warn those eager immigrant enterpreneurs to protect their own children and grandchildren from the same fate as those of so many of the last century’s immigrants: Struggling with a culture of mediocrity in urban/suburban America.“.
This Steve represents the mindset of so many others in this country, who think that the immigrants take jobs away from the Americans. I think they’re not being fair by looking at only one side of the coin. True, some of these immigrants take up jobs that, had they not been here in this country, would have been done by locals. But at the end of the day, these legal/skilled immigrants add jobs – hundreds of thousands of them, in fact, to the economy here.
One only needs to look at a company like Google. It’s co-founder Sergey Brin happens to be the son of a Russian immigrant. Now his company has close to 10,000 employees, most of those jobs are taken by the children and grandchildren of last century’s immigrants, so to say. If at least 1 in 10,000 of today’s prospective immigrants go on to replicate Sergey Brin’s success, this country would still end up with a net gain of jobs.
I myself am a potential legal/skilled immigrant in US. I’ve been working here for close to 8 years. I dream of having my own company some day and be able to offer jobs to people here. I can’t do that now, because my “temporary” immigration status wouldn’t let me do that. My application for permanent residency has been pending for close to 4 years, with another 5-6 years of wait a very realistic scenario unless the immigration laws change.
If my company has 10 jobs, at least half of those would be located in this country, even after assuming I would “ship away” the other half by outsourcing. The point is, I can still create five new jobs here, which wouldn’t even exist if I can’t start my company in the first place! That, to me, is the other side of the coin all these Steves should see.
