Two-thirds of the new tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, but the sector’s technology CEOs continue lobbying for more imported workers in pursuit of “diversity.”
The 2020 Silicon Valley Index published by Joint Venture, a 501(c)(3) organization examining the Bay Area with a focus on the technology industry, found that 38 percent of Silicon Valley workers are foreign-born.
“Sixty-seven percent of the new tech talent in the core working age group (25-44) are Asian, the majority of whom are from India and China,” reported Joint Venture. “More than half of Silicon Valley’s residents now speak languages other than English at home.”
Silicon Valley’s share of foreign-born workers is at an all-time high, according Joint Venture:
The share of foreign-born residents continues to rise slowly but steadily, reaching 38% in 2018 (up from 28% in 1960 and 16% in 1940), particularly for employed residents and those working in technical occupations. In conjunction with this rise is an increase in the share of residents speaking languages other than English at home, which reached 51% in 2018.
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More of the region’s tech talent in 2018 was from India and China than from California and the rest of the United States combined. Sixty-seven percent of all new tech talent in the core working age group (25-44) were Asian, 30% were White, and a mere fraction of a percent were Black or African-American. Women comprise less than a third of all Silicon Valley tech talent in that age group, and make up less than a quarter of all technical roles at the region’s major tech companies.
Joint Venture’s 2020 report defines “new Silicon Valley residents” as those who moved to the region in 2019. It contrasted the new statistics with 2018, “56% of new Silicon Valley residents in 2018 (nearly 85,000 people) were between the ages of 18 and 34; one out of every five of those 18-34-year-olds was from abroad.”
Silicon Valley’s proportion of foreign-born residents (38 percent) is more than double the national average (14 percent), according to Joint Venture. San Francisco’s share of foreign-born residents is 33 percent, with California at 27 percent.
The foreign-born share of technology workers is not exclusive to Silicon Valley. Breitbart News reported in 2019:
Census data shows that one-in-seven software developers in Hudson County, New Jersey, were born in the United States, down from a six-in-seven share in 1980.
This wholesale replacement of American software experts by foreigners — mostly by Indian visa workers — is repeated in many counties across the United States, according to 2017 federal census data analyzed by R. Davis, a software developer in Silicon Valley.
Promotion of “diversity” as a virtue is ubiquitous across the world’s largest technology firms.
A recent investigation by Project Veritas revealed Facebook’s policy of favoring H-1B workers over American citizens, and encouraging hiring managers to favor Chinese and Korean visa workers over other visa workers.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
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