“If you are from any country in the world with a computer science degree, you are imminently employable.”
Those are the words of Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal (PYPL), CEO of financial technology startup Affirm and former chairman of Yelp (YELP). Levchin is also an immigrant. He told Yahoo Finance at South by Southwest in Austin that the American dream he was able to pursue is in danger.
Levchin’s family emigrated from Ukraine to the U.S. when he was 16. “As an immigrant, I felt not just OK to come here -- my family escaped the Soviet Union, we came here as refugees -- I felt welcome, like this was the place to realize my potential,” he said. “If you take that away, it starts cutting at the foundation of what this country is.”
Naturally, Trump’s isolationist comments about restricting competent, highly skilled foreigners from taking American jobs (not to mention his call for banning Muslims from entering the country and building a wall along the Southern border) doesn’t sit well with Levchin.
“The sad thing is that he didn’t invent xenophobia -- I don’t think people looked at him and got infected,” he says. Levchin says Trump must be resonating with a subset of Americans who already share his sentiments. “I don’t know what kind of commentary this is on our society, but it bums me out,” Levchin says.
The value of high-skilled workers
Levchin says H1-B visas are the best way to draw talent and innovation to the U.S. The H1-B allows employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations like computer systems analysts and programmers, physicians, professors, engineers and accountants.
“Let’s start stapling H1-Bs to people’s [computer science] diplomas and other relevant majors and solve that part. And then we can solve the other ones. I have yet to hear the candidate or a sitting president, for that matter, speak to that point directly,” said Levchin. (Levchin served on the board of Yahoo (YHOO), parent of Yahoo Finance, from 2012 to 2015.
During last week’s Republican debate, frontrunner Donald Trump did, in fact, speak to this point. Though Trump has been criticized for using undocumented workers and a student work visa program in the construction of his hotels, he claims that he will abolish all such immigration once in office. He said: “I know the H1-B very well. And it’s something that I frankly use and I shouldn’t be allowed to use it. We shouldn’t have it. Very, very bad for workers.”
Levchin says he knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur since he was a 20-year-old computer science major at the University of Illinois, and can’t imagine not having the chance to build his career in the States.
But Levchin praises President Obama for taking a business-minded approach to address immigration reform. “I’m happy to see this in the spotlight, almost as much for the content of his decision as the fact that he’s setting an example or pattern of ‘I found an issue I can solve.’ Let’s take this, solve it, and put it aside,” Levchin said.
Obama’s executive order on immigration would grant deferred action to parents of American citizens or legal resident children who have lived in the U.S. for more than five years if they register with the government, pay taxes and go through background checks (deferred action isn’t full legal status but would come with a three-year, renewable work permit and exemption from deportation). Still pending is the Supreme Court’s hearing on United States v. Texas, in which 26 states are challenging the constitutionality of Obama’s programs.
According to the Council of Economic Advisors, if the president’s executive actions are fully implemented, it could boost the U.S.’s economic output by $100 billion to $250 billion and raise average annual wages for U.S.-born workers by 0.4%, over the next 10 years.
Levchin isn’t alone in his view that high-skilled immigrants are vital for Silicon Valley’s survival. Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg teamed up with Bill Gates, LinkedIn (LNKD) co-founder Reid Hoffman and other tech leaders to form a lobbying group Fwd.us in 2013 to urge the Supreme Court to uphold Obama’s order to provide relief to immigrant families. Levchin is among 51 contributors to the group, which also includes Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.
“When we came to the U.S., we were literally reading U.S. history and this is the American dream. You go in and you build a life for yourself because you left nothing behind. If we have a president or a presidential candidate that says ‘Don’t come here. Not enough for everybody,’ that’s a big change.”