Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…It seems like a lot of people will try to slow them down, but yeah, I hope they get far. Another difficult topic, immigration. What’s your take on the, let’s say, heated H-1B visa debate that’s going on online and legal immigration in general? I should start by saying I am not involved in any aspect of government policy on this. I’m not planning to be, this is not an issue that I’m working on or that I’m going to work on. This is not part of the agenda of what the firm is doing, my firm is doing. So I’m not in the new administration or the government, I’m not planning to be, so purely just personal opinion. So I would say I would describe this as I have a complex or nuanced, hopefully nuanced view on this issue that’s maybe a little bit different than what a lot of my peers have. And I thought about this, I didn’t say anything about it all the way through the big debate over Christmas, but I thought about it a lot and read everything. I think what I realized is that I just have a very different perspective on some of these things, and the reason is because of the combination of where I came from and then where I ended up. Let’s start with this, where I ended up, in Silicon Valley, and I have made the pro high-skilled immigration argument many, many times, the H-1B argument many times. In past lives, I’ve been in D.C. many times arguing with prior administrations about this, always on the side of trying to get more H-1B’s and trying to get more high-skilled immigration. And I think that argument is very strong and very solid, and has paid off for the US in many, many ways. And we can go through it, but I think it’s the argument everybody already knows, it’s like the stock. You take any Silicon Valley person, you press the button and they tell you why we need to brain drain the world to get more H-1B’s. So everybody gets that argument. So it’s basically, just to summarize, it’s a mechanism by which you can get super smart people from the rest of the world, import them in, keep them here to increase the productivity of the US companies.…

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