Sunder Pichai the CEO of Google, one of, if not the largest tech company in the world, sent out a memo to its employees that they should fly back as soon as possible if not then they might be stuck out of United States for an extended amount of time. "It's painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues," he wrote. Google has been continuously speaking out against the ban. It has already donated 4 million USD to different pro-immigration causes. Google employees also took part in the protesting by staging a walkout against the ban.
Other major companies that have protested include Apple, Microsoft, Lyft, Air BnB etc. Lyft has also donated 1 million USD to ACLU. On the other hand, Uber initially faced a bit of tough time when over 200,000 users deleted their accounts, thus forcing Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to step down from Trump’s advisory committee. They also offered a 3 million USD fund to help the affected drivers with their legal issues. And almost all of the other tech companies offered their employees free legal advice in case of detention or other issues due to the immigration ban as well.
So, why is there this solidarity against the newly elect president of the United States? And for Immigrants? What has the tech industry go to do with the immigrants anyway? Well all you have to do is started noticing. Notice that all the leading tech companies have upper echelon management with at least one person that has been at one point, an immigrant. Google CEO Sunder Pichai is from India, Google co-founder Sergey Brin is from Russia; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is from India as well. Around fifty Percent of all the major startups have at least on immigrant co-founder.
An open letter written by all the top tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc has been. The reason was the recent immigration ban. Here’s an excerpt from the letter: "In a global economy, it is critical that we continue to attract the best and brightest from around the world," Each company also issues the h1 B Visas to call in the best of the best for their company. Tech companies take up a large portion of the quota for H1-B immigrants and are dependent on the best of the best for their companies.
Another letter was also written, by more than 115 startups’ founders. An excerpt from the letter: "Silicon Valley flourishes because of our free and open culture of entrepreneurship and excellence. The President's actions yesterday not only negatively affect Tech's competitiveness, they hurt the US economy overall." So this was handed over to the President’s office. Also, a few days ago, some more than 400 tech leaders wrote a statement for Trump. This statement explains how the ban affects us.
"In addition to all of the humanitarian reasons to welcome refugees, it is dangerous to discourage immigration when the facts show that immigrant entrepreneurs play a significant role in the American economy. Immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as the native-born population. Immigrant entrepreneurs started, in whole or in part, some of the most important technology companies of our time including LinkedIn, Tesla Motors, Zipcar, Google, Intel, Yahoo!, eBay, and WhatsApp. More than half of the companies on the current list of U.S. technology startups valued at $1 billion or more were started by immigrants.
We should be doing everything in our power to attract these entrepreneurs to the United States. Yet when we close the door to immigrants from certain countries, not to mention to refugees, we are telling all immigrants that they are not welcome here"
Tech companies depend a lot on immigrants. They hire the best and the brightest and hire them at lesser salaries. Save the industry millions of dollars. Tech companies depend a lot on the H1-B visas, and since there has been news floating around, that Donald Trump might sign another executive order and completely overhaul the work visa requirements and structure, so they might lose access to this resource as well.
The ban right now has been put on hold by a judge, but the result might’ve allowed the immigrants with green cards to enter, however, now they have to go through extensive questioning and this detains them for long periods of time as well. The ban if continued might be disastrous for the Unite States economy. Not hiring foreign immigrants might risk a brain drain for the country as the companies are pushed to relocate themselves out of the United States and in to other countries, they might not find the same level of skill in that much quantity over in United States, therefore this might result in lost productivity.
Tech industry and companies rely on foreign workers and employees. So many of the innovations in the US were invented, founded, or co-founded by immigrants or foreigners. Innovations like Google, or iPhone. Can you imagine living without these products? Banning the immigration to a certain no. of countries does not help in any case. It leaves the impression that today these 7 countries were banned; tomorrow it might be 7 more. And one day it might be my country. So people would just stop trying sooner or later. They would just think that if I go there my country might get banned to and I will be stuck here or maybe thrown out. So it seems the Ban really is a war against Silicon Valley and tech industry.
