American Made - or Wasn't It

I have to post about a personal and not art related matter again, which is very important for me personally. I apologize for that before hand, but things like this are sometimes necessary. :)

When I posted yesterday about the YouTube video about the labor certification, did I also read the comments to the article in InformationWeek that pointed me to the video in the first place.

I also spend time to read some additional articles related to the subject, such as this one, titled
"The H-1B Debate: Beneath The Policy, The Personal".

I left a comment there as well and decided today to post about the issue again and show some aspects of the issue, which are often overlooked and ignored during the debate.

It often sounds like that America is doing foreign workers a favor by letting them into the country and work and produce in the United States.

This is only true in some cases, but it is in all cases also the other way around. The foreign workers are doing America a favor. In fact, America would not be what it is today without them.

You do not do me a favor by giving me a Green Card one day. You do yourself a favor, because if this is not going to happen, I will pack up and leave and take my business and ideas with me to another place, where my contributions to society is appreciated and wanted, not only financially (which makes a big junk of it though), but also culturally and intellectually.

To show my point, am I showing you an interesting study that was published by the NVCA - National Venture Capital Association called: "American Made - The Impact of Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Professionals on U.S. Competitiveness". You can download the study in PDF format here.

Often forgotten is the fact that you need a Green Card or Citizenship to start your own business in the U.S. (not to confuse with foreign investment and a visa you would get without problem because of that).

There is a considerable number of Immigrants who do not want to "take away a job of an American", no, they want to create jobs for Americans, if you let them. H-1B visa owners are often highly skilled and intelligent and made of the material that makes up an entrepreneur.

Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Sun Microsystems, Intel, WebEx, NVIDIA, Juniper Networks are all American companies, right? Not really, if the anti-immigration supporters would get it their way, none of those companies would exist, at least not in the United States.

The funny thing is that the complaints are coming from people who are not Native Americans. They are in essence former immigrants themselves or the descendant of one.

Germany, the country where I was born, has never been a country of immigration and the immigration laws of Germany always reflected that. They are bad and anti-immigration and Germany realized that they lost competitive advantage because of it. How much of great engineering and technological innovation came from Germany in the last few decades? Not very much, at least not enough to justify the view that some people still have of Germany.

Those things from the past, glory and reputation will fade away eventually if Germany will remain unable to live up to it.

Do Americans want to put themselves into the same position by forgetting and ignoring what made this country what it is today in the first place? I do not think so. Keep this in mind when you scream and yell about not letting highly educated and skilled foreign workers into the country where you did not even had to pay for their education.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC