The topic of immigration and jobs to foreign workers can be a contentious issue for many people with strong national pride and identity but the world is just moving at such a fast pace and technology at an even faster pace that fundamental fixes to many modern skills and labour challenges are on trans-generation timelines... time that the momentum of change doesn't have to wait. As this is the case we have to look beyond our borders and reach out anywhere we have to, to overcome the challenges. This is fundamental entrepreneurship and business.

I don't feel that Sonics counter arguments to Paul Graham hold much clout when we really think about it so I'll break a couple of his counter points down and give my thoughts on them. I've removed some of the original text for the point of being succinct.

1) 'why is this ‘exceptional’ thing suddenly the standard? No, we need to leave all those people (99% of normal americans) sitting at home and rewire all our immigration laws to ensure that some mythical ‘exceptional programmers’ can get here'

Fortunately these workers are not mythical and it's not a hope that these people exist. Factually they're out there. Exceptional coders are not just people who can write code, they are people who can self interpret challenges and visualise the solutions far beyond the spec and the stated requirements. Great programmers can marry the standard technology with new and unexpected solutions. You cannot teach this stuff, it requires individual initiative, passion and personality. This goes far beyond textbook college coding education.

2) 'we might just as well assert that 95% of ‘great’, oh, let’s say, construction workers, or librarians, or dental techs, are born outside the US. But so what? Does this mean we need to displace all the domestic construction workers/librarians/dental techs so that we can suck up only the ‘great’/’exceptional’ ones from elsewhere?'

These industries themselves rarely have innovation and deal with constants. Tech however transcends all industries and is thus driving the modern economy. Whether it's Banking & Investment, Social media & Communication, P2P Lending, Manufacturing or what ever you can imagine, coding is needed.

3) What’s so special about programming that it – and it alone – is the industry where the US has to wave everyone in?

Tech is the fabric of the modern world, little else can be held to the same stature. And as I wrote above, it transcends all industries. In the interconnected world that we live in, watching and reacting to competitors is nothing like it's ever been before. Small teams of great programmers can launch a competitors idea and get traction quicker then the good team of programmers originally working on the idea.

4) Who exactly are these ‘few thousand’ ‘great programmers’ – so great that they’re (uniformly) greater than any American – that we don’t let in, anyway? I actually don’t buy this.

They're people who are much hungrier than the comfortable consumer in the west. From societies and cultures that drive home discipline and education far beyond us in the west. They're from countries where being the best you can be is the only way to a proper life. Work ethic, skills and culture is superior to the comfortable and personal standards of average western individuals.

5) why doesn’t this hypothetical guy, if he’s so ‘great’ and ‘exceptional’, just do his own thing?"
Where they're from the infrastructure and support networks perhaps are just not up to scratch. The cards are stacked against them even more than in the west. Not only this, the blog post author is assuming that exceptional coders, as a general rule of thumb, should want to run their own company.