This rhetoric is insulting to Americans. We're not talking about something "carefully cultivated over a century." U.S. didn't have OPT until 1992!

The foreign-born population in the U.S. was around 5% when tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, HP, and Intel were founded. And most of the immigration to the U.S. up to that point was low-skill immigration, with ad-hoc measures to take skilled immigrants here and there. That approach worked fine to develop the U.S. into a leading technological power.

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alyeska2 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'm an American who's not insulted by the parent comment, but am tired of your constant weirdly racist anti-immigration posts. Aren't you an immigrant or child of immigrants from Pakistan or India? I recognize your username but forget which exact unique form of hypocritical xenophobia you hold.

The US has benefited massively from having years of the best and brightest from all around the world come to the US to research medicine, engineering and science. It's not about the one guy who's CEO of some tech company, it's about the thousands of graduate students, post docs and researchers doing the actual work to move humanity forward one lab-rat or laser measurement or petri dish at a time.

The 20th century was full of authoritarians attacking the intelligencia. A nation of uneducated peasants is easier to control and exploit. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

	▲	rayiner 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It’s precisely because I’m an immigrant that I chafe at the narcissism of immigrants who want to overstate our contribution to the U.S. as it exists today. The U.S. was already a fully formed, technologically advanced superpower by the time my family got here in 1989. Desis like me came here because our effort goes a thousand times farther within the system—, constitutional, legal, cultural, etc.—that Americans created than it does in the countries we created. We shouldn’t be blowing smoke up our own asses and pretending that we had more to do with it than we did. Yes, the U.S. benefited from key foreign talent acquisitions like bringing over German scientists after World War I. The 1952 H-1 Act and some ad hoc programs brought over college professors and people like that. But “mass skilled immigration” in the form of H-1B, OPT, etc., didn’t happen until the early 1990s.

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dalyons 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Coincidentally the mid 90s was when the US GDP really started to outpace the EU

	▲	rayiner 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You can’t see any change in the trend line in the mid 1980s: https://www.aei.org/economics/eu-vs-usa-part-v/. The growth slope for the U.S. has been very consistent since the early 1980s.