As a former H1 visa holder, this article interested me and shows the value that immigrants bring to the USA.
According to this opinion piece, the USA and specifically Santa Clara county is only the leader in tech because of immigrants.
In 1965, the Immigration Act of 1924 was repealed, opening the gates to immigrants and allowing a critical mass of technology companies to develop in clusters around Boston and Santa Clara County. A significant proportion of all the best graduates from the best schools in India (IIT) came to the USA -- in effect, the USA siphoned off India's best talent and used it to develop leadership in technology and to grow the economy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mr_mischief on Saturday December 01 2018, @02:26AM
tl/dr: Invest in education, research, and proximity of yourself and your business to an educational/industrial/investment cluster. That's what works in the US, and also in Europe and Asia.
Just from Bell Labs, since parted from AT&T through the Lucent spin-off and now part of Nokia, we got transistors, lasers, packet switched networks, Unix, C, p-n junction PV cells, DSPs, communication satellites, radio astronomy, lightwave communications, laser cooling and trapping of atoms, CCD sensors, the electrical relay digital computer, information theory, PCM encoding, wave/particle duality of photons, and a whole lot more.
Fairchild, Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Motorola, and more refined semiconductors, made integrated circuits part of everyday life, and went on to work with microprocessors first invented by Intel. Intel itself was founded by many senior staff who left Fairchild together. Some of these companies are out of the mainstream microprocessor market, but still make all sorts of other integrated circuits. Intel and AMD have huge R&D budgets. So do any companies competing with them in chip design like IBM (US), ARM (UK), Apple (US), or Samsung (South Korea). So do any companies making the chips like Intel, TSMC (Taiwan), IBM (US), Global Foundries (US), Fujitsu (Japan).
Xerox invests heavily in R&D, with their own dedicated campus at Palo Alto. They invented Ethernet, laser printers, the GUI, the mouse, WYSIWYG editors, class-based OOP, prototype-based OOP, and more. They contributed to work in LCD and optical disks.
It's the single largest industrial research group on Earth. As of 2013 the company held the record for most patents generated by a business for 22 consecutive years and its employees had garnered five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science. It's IBM Research. IBM invented many of the technologies used by computers, powering computers, and which use computers. How about your bank's ATM? Dynamic RAM, electronic keypunch, floppy disk. They also invented the fixed-head hard disk drive - in 1956 - and later the floating head drive. The magnetic stripe and reader, scanning tunneling microscope, UPC, virtual machines, time clocks, automated test scoring, relational databases, silicon-on-insulator fab technology, copper wiring within semiconductors. They brought us the venerable Fortran. They do all this through a whole branch of the company which includes 12 research institutes and gets 6% of corporate revenue.
From MIT and alumni we got the world wide web (WWW), GPS, Doppler radar, safety razors, wind tunnels, nuclear fission, the microprocessor (Noyce of Intel graduated MIT), refined petroleum, the genetic link to cancer, air conditioned buildings, the computer spreadsheet (Bricklin is an alum), E-ink, electronic mail, The Human Genome Project, PET scans, and some formalized engineering discipline (electrical, aeronautical, nuclear). People from MIT have been directly involved in the founding of Boeing, Intel, HP, TSMC, Raytheon, Boston Dynamics, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Akamai, DEC, EMC, Gillette, Apollo Computer, Teradyne, 3Com, LinkedIn, Coursera, Khan Academy, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lisp Machines, Douglas Aircraft, Fairchild Semiconductor, KLH, and Thinking Machines. Also the Internet Archive and the EFF involved founders from MIT.
Harvard pioneered human organ transplants; the hydrogen maser; the pacemaker; the relationships among DNA, individual genes, and proteins they encode; synthetic hormones; the heart defibrillator; the understanding that radioactivity and electromagnetism are two manifestations of the same force; and mapped the mechanism by which blood vessels grow in tumors. Alumni gave us much more, including spreadsheets (Bricklin went to more than one school). Microsoft, Facebook, TSMC, Morgan Stanley, Textron, Baker Hughes, Electronic Arts, Viacom, Polaroid, Sun Microsystems, 3com, AirBnB, Cloudera, Valve, 3DO, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, BBN Technologies, FitBit, Yelp, Zynga, Broderbund, Cognizent, Computervision, Intuit, O'Reilly Media, and Software Arts were among the companies to come from Harvard alumni.
Carnegie Mellon gave us artificial intelligence, the precursor technology to WiFi (Wireless Andrew), autonomous cars, and the Mach kernel. They have given us the Alice and Bliss languages and an alum gave us Java. An alum gave us emoticons, and another CAPTCHA. Alumni have founded or cofounded Adobe Systems, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Xerox PARC, Activision, Juniper Networks, and DuoLingo.
Stanford and their people have given us antibody therapy, FM sound synth, DSL, the optical fiber signal amplifier, recombinant DNA testing, the diagnostic test for TB, refocus photography, and bioplastics from municipal waste. Their alumni and past faculty have founded or cofounded Google, Cisco Systems, Dolby Laboratories, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Instagram, Intuit, LinkedIn, Logitech, MIPS Technologies, Netflix, Nike, NVIDIA, Orbitz, Rambus, SGI, Sun Microsystems, TSMC, Tesla, VMWare, Yahoo!, and Zillow among other companies.
UC Berkeley and their people discovered vitamins E and K. They developed the cyclotron. They brought us nuclear medicine. They developed the flu vaccine. Together with IBM, they gave us RISC with an ARPA grant. They pushed AT&T Unix into something more modern and usable. In fact, some aspects of Unix were based on Project Genie from when Ken Thompson worked on that university project. They discovered the first cancer-linked gene. They discovered telomerase and developed CRISPR. We got from them BSD, vi, Tcl, and the GIMP. They have discovered 16 periodic elements, carcinogens, covalent bonds, and the molecular clock. Folks from here went on to found or cofound Apple, Softbank, Sun Microsystems, Intel, eBay, HTC, Mozilla, SanDisk, Marvell, Tesla, and VMWare.
UCLA regularly leads all universities in the country in new patent awards. It leads #2 UC San Diego and #3 UC Berkeley this year. They actually have an organization called the UCLA Office of Intellectual Property & Industry Sponsored Research. Vint Cerf went there, for you Internet folks. Alonzo Church of the Church Thesis and lambda calculus for you functional programming folks. Asad Ali Abidi gave us CMOS RF circuits, for you software defined radio people. Turing Award laureate Judea Pearl brought us Bayesian networks and probabilistic AI. Gottlieb was the first to diagnose AIDS.
USC alumni include Neil Armstrong. There's also George Lucas, founder of Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic, and Skywalker Sound. Thomas Knoll gave us PhotoShop. Fred Cohen gave us computer antivirus (and among the first computer viruses). Rangaswamy Srinivasan while at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center gave us LASIK. William Wang founded Vizio. Tomlinson Holman while at the school gave us THX, at the request of George Lucas.
Alan Kay gave us Smalltalk; the Dynabook precursor to laptops, tablets, and e-readers; Tweak; a big influence on Squeak; and the overlapping window GUI. He attended Bethany College and the University of Utah. He was a professor at Utah and at UCLA. He's also worked at high levels within Atari, Xerox PARC, Apple, Disney Imagineering, and the HP Advanced Software Research Team. He founded Viewpoints Research Institute largely on a grant from the US National Science Foundation.
Most of the schools mentioned, along with others and several private companies, were involved with the ARPA-funded invention and NSF-funded growth of what is now the Internet.
Notice that Harvard, MIT, Boston College, and Boston University are in the same basic metro area. UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC San Francisco, San Francisco State U, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, San Jose State University, and many more schools are near one another around the San Francisco Bay and Silicon Valley. LA and San Diego and larger southern California area has UCLA, Cal Tech, Cal Poly Pomona, UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, Pepperdine U, and USC. Princeton, Bell Labs, and IBM are near one another. As are all the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay area companies and their schools. And all the tech startups in Boston and Cambridge are near that cluster of one another and those schools.
Farm tech and health tech often enough come from the University of Wisconsin, which has something called the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to connect people from the school with one another and businesses. WARF filed and won a half billion dollar patent suit against Apple, too, in case you need electronic tech.
Houston looks interesting. There's a medical center district. There's all the oil and gas companies with their tech. There's Rice University, University of Houston, and it's not far from Texas A&M. There are also TSU, a trio of strong community college systems, Baylor's college of medicine, UT Health, the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the University of St. Thomas. It's not terribly far from UT Austin or the main Baylor campus, nor Prairie View A&M, Stephen F. Austin, and Sam Houston State U. UT is discussing opening more than their health campus, adding a UT Houston to the University of Texas system.
Dallas, St. Louis, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, Baltimore, Arlington, Salt Lake City, Kansas City, and a bunch of other US metropolitan areas have the qualities to put them close to this sort of clustering effect just like Houston. Some of them already experience it to a lesser degree than the Valley, Seattle, and New York. A few right moves and it'd be off to the races.
Silicon Valley invented modern venture capital investment. Watch "Something Ventured" on Netflix. The US also had, until 2013, a different patent system than most of the world. It was tilted in favor of rapid invention, being a first to invent country rather than a first to file model. That is no longer the case, but the advantages are still felt.