Comment by thecourier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thecourier | Hacker News Reader

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Do you remember that time Steve Jobs and Obama had dinner and discussed engineering immigration?

http://www.businessinsider.com/when-steves-jobs-and-barack-o...

"Jobs continued to press the engineering angle at the dinner, saying that at the time Apple employed 700,000 factory workers in China, plus 30,000 engineers to support those workers."

We need the best talent of the world to be a technological leader nation. nonetheless, there is a big amount of jobs that need a good engineer but not a bright mind as Wozniak.

This is how globalization works and we need to keep up or be defeated by a better player at accepting STEM immigration. Let the fear aside, confront the global arena and struggle to keep being leaders of the world.

It's interesting that the two options Steve Jobs mentioned were:

1. Put the factory and the jobs in China

2. Put the factory and the jobs in the US, using workers who are imported (from China/India/et al)

Why doesn't Jobs mention an option to, oh, I don't know, _make a commitment to the millions of people who are already in the US_ looking for work?

And, who better than Apple itself to train up some _existing_ members of the US labor pool in how to do what Apple does?

To the extent that "American" corporations are shells that import manufactured goods from foreign factories and import engineers from foreign societies, I have to wonder whether I give a crap if the US is a "technological leader."

Maybe if some Chinese investors bought Apple and moved the whole mess to Shenzhen, the world would finally get reasonable prices on (and customization of) Apple hardware.

The vast majority of the factory jobs are automatable, and will vanish in time, and have likely been continually vanishing.

That reality would sit poorly with Americans who didn't see it coming, and certainly with those trying to use offshore manufacturing for political support, but that's been the plan all along.

<Apple employed 700,000 factory workers in China, plus 30,000 engineers>

Read that again. That means that for every domestic engineer job (even assuming all were in the USA), Apple created 23 offshore jobs in China alone.

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