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Okay, I'm stumped then. How do we allow top tier talent without just letting everyone in?
Musk and Huang wouldn't have been admitted under some sort of H1B/points scheme either. So the only way to get them is open borders? That seems like a bad bargain, even for geniuses of that caliber.
What would you do if you were the king of the United States?
Isn't it a fallacy of some sorts? Perhaps NVIDIA or Musk's companies would not exist exactly as they are if the immigration laws had been different and enforced differently. However, it is not like we can observe the counterfactual outcomes. Would not there be GPU companies in the US without the single individual Huang? According to Wikipedia article concerning NVIDIA founding, there were 70 graphics computing start-ups in the US in the 1990's. The market environment would have been similar without NVIDIA.
Musk's enterprises appear more singular and his interests idiosyncratic, so imagining alternative paths is more difficult. Some of the alternative paths could have seen less technological development and slightly more enshittified world today. However, it is not certain the alternatives would have been worse. Perhaps, with overall more stringent US immigration there would have been another innovative tech scene (or several) somewhere else and he would have migrated there. Stronger competition between the SV and other hypothetical scenes would perhaps have produced even greater technological innovation and varied, better outcomes for everyone. Or if there was no alternative to SV, they could have collected the points under the alternative immigration system at another life stage. (Or perhaps the people who would have prospered under a different legislation would have been more stellar and exceptional.)
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Allow essentially unlimited immigration for groups like Taiwanese and white South Africans who have a track record of making countries better, but not allow Indians without a Nobel prize on their application?
There was also a post on Marginal Revolution the other day referencing Hanania and calling for more US immigration based on the outcomes of Musk and Huang.
Maybe that's what's motivating some of the comments in this thread. Yet, I suspect if one proposed to—while keeping all else the same—increase the number of Taiwanese and white South African immigrants by 10x, much less infinity, the reaction from many mass-US-immigration enthusiasts would be along the lines of "no, not like that!"
Sure, my preferred immigration system would be something like ‘open borders following a background check for groups I like, no immigration for groups I don’t’. That’s what everyone prefers. Conventional immigration advocates simply like different groups.
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There's a reason that we're in this situation, and it's because it's not an easy problem.
I think the thing that sets Musk and Huang apart from the average H1B is the entrepreneurial spirit. Perhaps there could be a way to admit people like that selectively for them to start businesses bere, but note that Huang's success is at least partly thanks to the guys he met at his second job.
It's entirely possible that you have to either err on the side of letting in too many or too few, although there may be some obvious gains by cutting down on clueless imported cognizant employees. At least, I am not aware of any cognizant H1Bs that went on to do great things.
That makes sense to me. I wish you would post more top level content here. As much as I hate you needling my comments, I think you are a clear thinker.
There's no way to measure this in a person. Furthermore, I think this is much more about culture at a local and national level. Stated differently a lot of "entrepreneurialism" is simply the American Way. A really obvious example of this is the fact that Europe's tech sector is approximately zero even though they have more than enough elite human capital. In fact, not only do the best European engineers come to the U.S., the best Canadian one's do (Waterloo is the Stanford of Canada).
Although your analysis quite good, I think the Jensen and Elon arguments fall into the "Great Man" fallacy. That without this one, specific human, we don't get the rise of GPUs (nVidia) or SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter revamp etc. I don't believe this. I think the major technological progress arc of history is mostly about the collective increase in human knowledge (and ways of sharing it) combined with ever more excess wealth and capital to finance the implementation of that knowledge. This goes back quite a ways - didn't both Leibniz and Newton independently invent equivalent theories of calculus?
So, maybe the hard-scrabble Jensen Huang isn't let it. Maybe Elon the Lumberjack stays in Canada. I don't think that's bad in the specific. I'd assume we get Eensen Muang and Jelon Husk instead - maybe two Math Olympiad champions, or obvious super STEM graduates from prestigious foreign universities. I seriously doubt we somehow fail to create trillions of dollars of value because these two people, in specific, aren't admitted to the U.S.
I don't think it's overdetermined that NVidia and SpaceX are American companies. It seems plausible to me that the leaders in these fields would have ended up Chinese in an alternate universe (not that America never would have invented graphics cards, but that Chinese competition may have leapfrogged American firms, as Japanese cars did American ones).
The "Great Man" theory is a theory, not a fallacy, and I think it's pretty clearly correct at least in some cases (would Shmalexander the Great really have conquered all those kingdoms?). Whether it's true or not in these cases is hard to say.
Ironically, rejecting it entirely seems to be close to what I see people here accusing the left of, that is, "treating people as fungible economic units".
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