Last week, I presented at the inaugural Ignite DC. The event, which took place in the Artomatic building in Washington DC’s Capitol Riverfront neighborhood, featured 17 speakers who each had to get through 20 Power Point slides in just 5 minutes.
With the slides advancing every 15 seconds, you either have to be a REALLY fast talker or restrict your speech to just a few important points (I tried a mixture of both).
The event was very well attended (I’d say there were about 150 people in the audience) and the organizers did a great job decorating the venue with interesting artworks and putting together a diverse group of speakers that gave presentations on policy issues, art, music and social entrepreneurship.
My presentation aimed to answer the question what Jimmy Stewart and the movie It’s a Wonderful Life can teach us about the US technology industry.
Well, ok. My presentation really focused on the need for the US to expand (or at the very least, not diminish) the number of H-1B visas and Green Cards available for foreigners who want to work in the US. But I tried to make that discussion a little more interesting by inserting some fun movie references.
The H-1B program, in particular, has been under attack lately from policymakers who claim that big companies use H-1Bs to get vast amounts of low-level back office work done by underpaid foreigners. As we’ve pointed out previously, this is not true: The majority of H-1B holders have Master’s or even PhD degrees – often in math or the sciences – and are simply too in demand to work in America at below-market rates.
What is more, it isn’t just big companies that apply for H-1Bs – on the contrary. Startups need specialized talent more urgently than larger firms, and they therefore often apply for H-1Bs to hire one particular person who can lead a team or develop a new solution. If the number of H-1Bs is cut (or, in a worst case scenario, the H-1B program gets abolished), startups will face a definite competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis larger, already established competitors.
So, what can Jimmy Stewart teach us about the US tech industry?
In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey aka Jimmy Stewart is about to kill himself when an angel appears and shows him what the world would have looked like if he had never been born. So, I tried to play angel Clarence for the Ignite crowd and answer the question what the US tech industry would look like if foreigners hadn’t traditionally been welcomed in the US.
As I pointed out in my Ignite presentation, the technology industry is extremely important for the US economy. In the past four years alone, the tech industry added 382,900 jobs in the US – that’s almost as many jobs as people living in DC. A lot of these jobs wouldn’t be here, however, if it weren’t for foreigners helping to build and expand the industry.
Just in the past year, tech companies created 77,000 net jobs. And we aren’t talking burger flippers or George Bailey’s bank tellers here – we are talking highly-paid jobs for highly-skilled people. In the years prior to 2008, the industry created an additional 79,600 jobs (2007), 139,000 jobs (2006), and 87,400 jobs (2005).
Technology has also really changed our lives – just think about how much time we spend online and how much easier and more efficient many aspects of our lives have been made by the Internet. In fact, if you’re wondering just how many hours we’re online each week, an IDC survey found that the average person in 2007 spent 32.7 hours on the Internet.
Weird, I thought I spent that much time on Facebook alone… but that might just be me!
Without the tech industry, there would be fewer jobs and a lower GDP, and a greater percentage of those fewer jobs would be in traditional industries such as manufacturing (which is really not an industry you want to be in right now). But what does this all have to do with foreigners, Green Cards and H-1Bs?
As I mentioned above, foreigners have been instrumental in building and expanding the US tech industry. Some of the companies that have become the greatest success stories in technology were founded or co-founded by people who were born outside of the United States. Examples are eBay (founded by French-born Pierre Omidyar), Google (co-founded by Russian-born Sergey Brin) and Sun (co-founded by German-born Andy von Bechtolsheim and Indian-born Vinod Khosla).
And Intel, the company that invented the first single-chip microprocessor in 1971 and with that invention sparked a revolution that led to a huge expansion of the chip industry, was led during that crucial time in the 1970s by Hungarian-born Andy Grove.
In addition, there are thousands of smaller tech startups in the US that were founded and / or are led by non-Americans. According to a Duke University study published in 2007, foreign-born entrepreneurs were behind one in four American technology startups from 1995 to 2005 and generated 450,000 domestic jobs in 2005. In the same year, immigrant entrepreneurs’ companies generated $53 billion dollars in sales.
And foreigners made important contributions even before the Internet was invented – in fact, they helped to build the “first Internet:” the railroad system! In the 1860s, Chinese immigrant workers laid a big junk of the railroad tracks that were needed to connect the East and the West of the United States. According to Congress, without the help of the Chinese immigrants in building the railroad system, the progress of the US as a nation would have been delayed by decades.
The United States is a great country, especially for entrepreneurs, researchers, and the intellectually curious. Foreigners come here because we believe that there is no other place on earth where we can put our talents to better use, where we can achieve more, and where we have a better shot at changing the world.
George’s Bailey’s little girl in It’s a Wonderful Life hope that every time the bell rings, an angel gets his wings.
Well, I personally hope that every time the bell rings…
… a foreigner gets their H-1B!
A video of my presentation at the Ignite event can be found here.