It seems that the US policy allowing immigration based on skills enabled Silicon Valley to rise above the rest of the world.
The importance of this should not be underestimated; the US manufacturing sector is in comparative decline and without the technology sector (mainly in California) it is hard to see how US GDP growth would have been sustained.
It is a compelling argument to actively reach out and recruit such talent.
The US, meanwhile, garnered the best brains from the whole world, Asia especially. Wall Street, American academia, business, medicine and law all gained phenomenally. Asian-Americans have won a dozen Nobel prizes. The tech industry, too, has been given a world-beating boost from Asian immigration. Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University has shown that “as of 2005, 52.4 per cent of Silicon Valley’s companies had a chief executive or lead technologist who was foreign-born
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