My mistake. I had a point to make about immigration but forgot to make it, the draft stayed in place. Regarding long term immigration, I thought gaijins could never secure PR or citizenship (i.e. residence not tied to work) unlike in say the US (Green Card) or Singapore (PR, PEP) to name two.

FWIW I think immigration policy being overly strict harms economic growth in two ways:

- depleting the supply of talent increasing the cost of running a business that depends on the talent;

- stopping foreign founders from starting a business in your country to take advantage of its better conditions cuts the number of high growth businesses.

On the first point, Singapore is the extreme example. There are/were no Haskell developers there at least at the price we were able to pay (because the only Haskellers were at Standard Chartered making about twice as much). I tell this story often so the details might be fuzzy as time passes and the numbers dissolve in my memory, but our job ad had 150 qualified applicants (i.e. completed our selection task and it compiled and worked as expected) from the rest of the world (mostly from the US, Canada and Northern Europe) and 0 from Singapore, not even on EPs, although two SCB chaps did get in touch informally asking about the salary range.

My then team of 10 would never have existed had Singapore not had its extremely open Employment Pass system (which the US does not have); every single member (bar one Singaporean who learnt Haskell) was "imported". In practice, we had planned for this eventuality and had looked into alternative locations; half the team ended up remote anyway.

On the second point, I once made a back of the envelope calculation showing that around 40% of famous Silicon Valley founders (i.e. Intel, Apple, etc. level companies - I just took the list of the highest valued and kept working down until I had a significant sample) were first or second generation immigrants. Taking our two examples, Jobs had a Syrian father and Andy Grove was born Andris Gróf in Budapest.

The real damage of the H1-B policy (other than being a lottery and being gamed to hell and back) is thus tying the visa to a workplace. It's not damaging per se, since one could in theory spin up a company and apply for the visa; it's damaging in practice, because the process takes months, expensive lawyers, and piles of paperwork which is definitely not "useful" work and usually unaffordable to a "normal" startup founder. Singapore, again, has it right: an Employment Pass takes around 7 working days to be approved, making it extremely easy to change jobs.

(However, due to people using its EntrePass to skip investor visa requirements, it now has ridiculous requirements such as hiring levels to be maintained and having to be invested in from a shortlist of approved investors none of which actually do seed investing. So people spin up a company with their accountant as the local director and get themselves an Employment Pass that way...)

It's never been easier and cheaper to start an international software company, and software is "eating the world" so I suspect at some point a location will realize the potential. I wonder how long Silicon Valley's advantage in capital and knowledge will last as it restricts its effective talent pool to a population of 300 million vs the other 9 billion in the world rapidly arriving to middle class living standards and knowledge; but so far no country has gone forward and allowed foreigners (or non-Europeans, in the case of Europe) to start companies easily in their land.