Why Silicon Valley Is Fuming at Donald Trump’s Immigration Policies

Silicon Valley is not happy with top Republican candidate Donald Trump's stance against skilled foreign workers.

Todd Schulte, president of Fwd.us, a lobbying group founded by a myriad of tech company CEOs including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, published a biting criticism of anti-immigration reform, likely addressing the immigration policies that Donald Trump released this past Sunday.

The post denounces some broad stipulations that Trump's policies rest on, including the idea that foreign skilled workers coming in through H-1B visas (these are specifically for skilled professions) are undercutting similarly-skilled American workers who demand higher wages.

Trump is planning on a number of punitive policies, including:

• Tripling border protection officers

• Making Mexico pay for a wall across the southern border

• Deporting over 11 million illegal immigrants

• Arresting foreigners who overstay their visa (followed via a tracking system)

• Ending a jobs program for foreign youth to give to "inner city youth"

• Ending birthright citizenship, and much, much more

Schulte roundly rejected a lot of these points for being costly and plainly absurd to enforce. His argument rounds up statistics that conclude that foreign workers on H-1B workers create jobs, lower unemployment and raise economic growth, create Fortune 500 companies, stay in America, naturalize, and start their own businesses.

"The idea we should radically restrict pathways for highly-skilled immigrants to come and stay here is – again – just wrong. We need to fix our nation's badly broken immigration system so that more highly-skilled immigrants can create jobs here in the United States," he wrote.

While nailing the more obvious absurdities of Trump's policies, however, he also passes by the possible negative externalities that H-1B hires might cause.

Bob Cringely, a veteran tech journalist, had a few sad tales to tell from a friend who was a CTO at several companies. According to him, foreign skilled workers would be paid a third to a half of what their American counterparts were making and often, by necessity, put themselves into poorer living conditions. This is despite legally binding agreements that companies have to sign that ensures their foreign skilled workers would be paid similar and livable wages to their American counterparts.

But there are studies that suggest that the wage problem might not be as black and white as companies wanting to basically outsource their skilled workers. Nicole Kreisberg, a researcher at the American Institute for Economic Research, found that wage gaps don't arise from visas so much as they do from gender, age, ethnicity, race, and where the worker lives.

This is appropriate because Mexico just castigated Trump's plan as "racist" and "absurd." Surprisingly though, Trump also tucks in some pro-minority stances: he's all for hiring more black, Hispanic, and female workers to Silicon Valley's tech pool, so long as those minorities are actual US citizens. So he's not quite "absurd" and "racist" so much as he's absurd, perhaps misguided, and definitely jingoistic.

For instance, on raising wages H1-B visa workers to levels comparable to domestic workers:

"Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program."

On why we should erect a wall blocking off Mexico:

"U.S. taxpayers have been asked to pick up hundreds of billions in healthcare costs, housing costs, education costs, welfare costs, etc. Indeed, the annual cost of free tax credits alone paid to illegal immigrants quadrupled to $4.2 billion in 2011. The effects on jobseekers have also been disastrous, and black Americans have been particularly harmed."

Unfortunately for Trump, Kreisberg would say visas might not even be that much of an issue so much as racism and sexism. And goodness, we know the Valley could use so much less of it.