44% Unicorn Startups in the US were founded by foreign workers

So the doors are closed for legal immigrants - by the very definition people who are allowed to immigrate? Or do you mean that there is less immigration to the US in general? Or that only the illegal uneducated are „allowed“ to immigrate?

India has the most foreign founders.

Keep in mind that this is despite H1B rules disallowing most Indians from founding companies, and the 100+ year backlog for educated professional Indian immigrants gaining permanent residency meaning the U.S. system will never allow them to found a company within the country.

Related point, the ranking seems to roughly follow the law #unicorn-founders =(ethnic-population*English-proficiency)

> People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there.

Not saying you're wrong.. but what's the proof? It's easy to think of counterexamples. Places like Malaysia that are full of immigrants and are not particularly successful. Or Japan, which is notoriously insular and successful. London has the whole industrial revolution and boom before colonialism and the wave of immigrants

One would also expect a major difference between for instance the US siphoning off the world's top talent (ex: post USSR collapse immigrants from the scientific community) and undereducated economic refugees from Central America. For instance you're not exactly seeing a flood of Latin-America-born founders in the US (not the best metric, but still)

Except at that time migration was a relatively hard process and quite time consuming so those who migrated had interest in migrating there to conduct business. Not just to come to the streets paved with gold.

For the last 20 years across the whole western world we have seen that despite having more migrants than ever, the cities are not becoming cleaner or more vibrant - but rather everything goes backwards.

Ancient empires, early 20th century USA etc. succeeded not due to migration but due to government and people willing to work for the government to make it more successful.

Netherlands back then flourished thanks to being a trade superpower (similar to Venice a couple centuries earlier), not thanks to being open to immigrants. Poland was also extremely open to immigrants back then, but didn’t have the high seas trade and colonial empire - and didn’t do nearly as well as Netherlands did.

>It's too early to tell for sure but I wouldn't be surprised to see some beautiful things happen here over the course of the next decades.

I would bet the exact opposite.

Let's start off simply with the fact that Berlin is not intended to be SF or SV in any capacity by the German elite(you're better off going to Munich or Frankfurt for that). There is 0 institutional interest to make it an innovation hub on top of the political center, as once again this can be done elsewhere(preferably closer to actual industrial centres).

Secondly, it's simply impossible to get tier 0 tech talent to come to Berlin(unless you give a lot of equity or you have a very elaborate scheme to pay them via offshore, which most startuppers simply don't know how to do) due to salary/tax differentials with either US or even something like Zürich/London.

Lastly, there is 0 evidence that I've seen that German bureaucracy(Berlin included) is going to down, and that's been the case since the last 10 years. This will pretty cleanly stop most innovation.

I do agree with you here, but the broader problem with immigration is that in the context of your point I'd say that those weren't war torn or economic/welfare migrants but people who knew that heading to Rome would be for business first.

Essentially the type of immigration and it's lax rules in Europe isn't really comparable to labor immigrants, when you can have an entire city area of people who only lives on welfare with 0% interest in getting a job or even learning the language.

Which causes taxation to be delegated to an endless spiral of newly arrived immigrants who repeat the cycle.

And with that foundation you don't either always get 2nd/3rd generation that are working but instead doing crime.

Which drives the demand for labor immigrants down because they ofc don't want to establish themselves in a country that is dangerous.

Hence why most of the anti immigrantion policies are meant to only curb economic/welfare migrants and limit for now war refugees.

The UK established world dominance due to colonial trade during its Empire era, the industrial revolution, and the rise of financial institutions (in the early 19th century).

The UK's international heyday came at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Arguably, the power and influence of the UK has declined significantly since WW2.

Immigration to the UK prior to WW2 was pretty minor (e.g. the Huguenots and Irish immigrants). The last census prior to WW2 was in 1931 and showed England and Wales had only a 2.1% foreign-born population. By comparison, immigrants made up 6.6% of France's population.

Widespread immigration only occurred in the post-WW2 period, due to serious labour shortages in the UK. It was then that large numbers of immigrants, mostly from former colonies, settled in London. And then there were significant waves of immigration from Eastern Europe in the late 20th century due to globalisation and the enlargement of the European Union.

With that in mind, we need to be careful we're not confusing correlation and causation.

My interpretation of the timeline is that the UK became an immigration magnet due to its prosperity, rather than its prosperity being the result of mass immigration.

> People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there.

What’s your evidence for this? It’s more plausible that immigrants come to rich places for the potential to make money.

I don’t know about the Netherlands, but Silicon Valley arose in America during a time of historically low immigration. 1920s immigration reforms caused the foreign born population to drop from 15% to under 5% by 1970. Bill Shockley was born in London to American parents but raised in America. Six of the “traitorous eight” that founded Fairchild semiconductor were born in America. All the founders of Intel were born in America, same for AMD.

I see many people speculating in the comments about whether or not this may be true. Amy Chua wrote a book (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Empire) which makes exactly that point and presents compelling evidence going back as far as the Mongol empire.

The modern immigration is a lot different than in the past. Amsterdam, London or New York offered no support to immigrants, more like the opposite, where immigrants worked themselves to death in factories, plantation, mining, etc.

And modern immigration can split between legal immigrants with skilled professionals and illegal immigrants.

Europe is receiving a lot of ilegal economic immigrants with low education, doesn’t know german/french/italian/dutch or barely know English, and many are religious fundamentalist. What kind of innovation do you expect from them?

I don’t understand why Europe keeps accepting ilegal immigrants.

You should expect such a small country outlier given how this sort of thing is distributed.

India's unicorns are concentrated in a few cities, which house a relatively small portion of India's population.

You cannot compare since the data is confounded.

It’s way easier for Israelis to migrate to the us, than it is for Indians.

44% of Israel's exports is ICT, it's not surprising to see them create more than expected tech unicorns.

Also, is this a “one drop” rule — where a single foreign founder and three domestic founders counts as a “foreign founder”?

Foreign workers make up less than 20% of the US workforce according to: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the...

Over twice that proportion founding startups sounds very significant. It's not too surprising though - if you're able and willing to take the risk of migrating for work, you're probably more likely to be able and willing to start a company.

This is not a difference in countries but in the age of money in the family line and what parents tell kids they should value. There's a natural transition from doing well at business in one generation to then shift the family focus to policy be it in politics, philanthropy, or technical (mostly law and finance) roles of prestige in the bureaucracy (ie SEC, district attorney office) which are roles that you can swing for if you don't care about money. If the kids revolt against this they'll do the same low reward / high prestige move except they'll try to impress their friends instead of their family, and go into art.

The mid-20th century completely hollowed out American culture, and immigrants benefit from not having been exposed to that. The people who invented the internet now need a stream of Indians and Chinese to run it so they can share instas.