Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate, co-founded the MIT Media Lab. He was its Director when I showed up in Washington in 1986. He was a formidable figure in the rapidly developing world of digital communications and services.
I showed up to become the Director of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) which was an agency in the Commerce Department. I was coming from a legal, political and small business background in fly-over country.
As a Newbie I enjoyed being able to say “start from the beginning”. I brought few preconceived notions into those early conversations. But, as a state university educated lawyer I found MIT’s media lab almost disorienting. What I encountered were a lot of bright young people in research and development mode. Their most important work was trying and being instructed by success or failure. As a law student my practice format had been the courts.
A visual change for me was the composition of MIT’s student body as reflected in the make up of the media lab. I would say that a good 2/3rds of the students I saw in the lab had Asian backgrounds. And that brings me around to today’s immigration debate.
At its simplest the new Republican Party is convulsed by the large number of commentators and agitators representing a no new immigrants point of view. Their quite dubious assumption is that foreigners are taking American jobs. Forgetting that businesses create jobs.
The target of controversy are H-1B visas. H-1B visas are granted to “highly educated foreign professionals to work in speciality occupations.”
There is a vocal contingent led by Elon Musk that believe H-1B visas are a valuable enabler helping US companies recruit smart and disciplined engineering talent that comes from overseas. Musk and his peers belief is that American education and culture dull a native born version of a cohort that might aspire to this profile. At least in theory President-Elect Trump appears to agree with them.
Without weighing in on the stuff of American youth I know that becoming an accomplished engineer is hard work. When I hired a person to be the technology lead at Hearst New Media the applicants were mostly foreign born. I hired an Indian-American.
To me it is inconceivable that we should not encourage top engineering talent to work in America. The head of America’s fastest growing company over recent years is Taiwanese-American. He is Jensen Huang. The company, Nvidia. To one degree or another we are all hyphenated.
By contrast the only CEOs of Apple, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, were both native born. Nvidia and Apple are the world’s most valuable companies. Their leaders derived from different points of beginning but all three were/are imaginative, smart, obsessed and very successful. America should hope that those characteristics are readily available regardless of where they were born or their ethnicity.
At this writing it appears that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK) will have a major role in health care policy in the Trump Administration. I would prefer a person whose background is in artificial intelligence (AI). American or foreign born. When it comes to questions about the efficacy of vaccines or a whole range of technical issues I would rather we be led by somebody who puts the rigors of research ahead of intuition and bias.
In recent years America’s lawmakers, public policy advocates and business leaders have debated employment criteria. Merit should be at the beginning and end of job searches. Presumably we, the taxpayers and stockholders, want a good job done. How can it be otherwise?
Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al writes on themes from his book, Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.
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