California braces for upcoming battle against Trump hostility
California is girding for open revolt against the incoming U.S. presidency of Donald Trump.
In the weeks since the Nov. 8 presidential election, many of California’s leaders have felt that their state is suddenly out of sync with the rest of the U.S.
California is a social welfare, pro-immigrant, pro-environmental protection jurisdiction that invests heavily in its people. Those attributes run counter to the fundamentals of the “Trumpism” that triumphed Nov. 8.
California, of course, leads the U.S. in population and in economic and innovation prowess. Its success formula has many components. But few, if any, are more important than attracting the best and brightest tech talent worldwide. That reliance on well-paid immigrants treated with respect runs counter to the hostility of “Trumpism” to newcomers.
On Nov. 9, the day after the election that made Trump president-elect, California State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and his counterpart, State Senate Leader Kevin de Leon, issued a joint statement that vowed, “We are not going to allow one election to reverse generations of progress.”
Those combative words, variations of which have been issued by most of California’s top elected officials since Nov. 8, could be the opening salvo of an era of defiance against Washington. And some of the state’s business leaders will be on the front lines.
For the state’s business leadership, especially, the flashpoint for conflict with Trumpism is likely to be immigration. Multicultural California relies heavily on immigrant talent. Its business leaders, many of them first-generation immigrants, have been doing a slow burn since Trump got into the presidential race last year accusing Mexico of dumping its worst people in America, including rapists.
Ahead of the election, Shervin Pishevar, a California venture capitalist who helped fund Uber and Airbnb, wrote in a series of tweets that “if Trump wins, I am announcing and funding a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation.”
Pishevar has yet to make good on his pledge. But then, like the state’s popular governor Jerry Brown, he’s keeping his powder dry until the mercurial Trump shows his true colours. Then again, a lot of Californians, who voted by a two-toone margin for Hillary Clinton, figure they know what Trump is about.
Alex Padilla, the California secretary of state, has laid into Stephen Bannon, former chairman of the hate website Breitbart News and Trump’s future White House chief political strategist. Padilla said Bannon is one of the “direct threats to American liberty, multiculturalism and equal opportunity.”
Bannon is on record suggesting that too many of Silicon Valley’s leaders are Asian or South Asian.
Padilla is no outlier in worrying about the relentless attacks on “brown people” by Trump supporters. California billionaire tycoon and environmentalist Tom Steyer told the Los Angeles Times that “it’s impossible to look at the Trump campaign and not see a direct threat to the civil liberties and dignity of California citizens.”
Trump has pledged to scrap the Obama Administration directive that U.S.-born children of immigrants could easily gain citizenship — a blow to Silicon Valley’s recruitment efforts. And Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook Inc., has been dealt a reversal with the Trump victory. “Zuck” had been lobbying for an increase in the quota of H-1B work permits for foreignborn talent in Silicon Valley. But Zuckerberg is now fighting a rearguard action just to keep the existing quota in place, Trump having promised to slash the quota.
Trump believes the H-1B work permits enable foreigners to steal jobs from Americans. The reality is that both Canada and the U.S. suffer acute shortages of tech talent. At this writing, there are approximately 500,000 unfilled positions in the U.S. for computer programmers.
The xenophobia that helped get Trump elected and has swept across Europe, as well, is antithetical to how California created and nurtures its success.
The late Andrew Grove is among the three co-founders of Intel Corp. That company’s microchips have powered the Information Age, from mainframes to mobile phones. Grove was an immigrant from Budapest.
Fast forward to Google, the world’s dominant search engine. One of its two co-founders, Sergei Brin, is a native of Moscow.
And when he was at the iconic Valley firm Sun Microsystems Inc., James Gosling became the godfather of Java, the programming language of the Internet. Gosling is a native Albertan.
California’s hope of remaining at the world’s technological forefront is pinned to its ability to keep attracting immigrants. Foreign-born inventors account for 65 per cent of the patents earned by the California R&D operations of U.S. drugmaker Merck & Co. The numbers for General Electric Co. and wireless telecommunications giant Qualcomm Inc. are 64 per cent and 72 per cent, respectively.
And over the past decade, immigrant-founded venture capital firms have provided the funding for California startup companies that have created 450,000 jobs. Those companies now have a total stockmarket value of about half a trillion dollars (U.S.).
About 250,000 Canadians work in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, Southern Ontario has by now developed a critical mass of talent and funding for tech startups. The Trump election has emboldened tech recruiters in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Kitchener-Waterloo to start reversing the brain drain to California by luring Canucks to come home.
Equally worrisome to Silicon Valley recruiters is that even the perception abroad of American xenophobia will steer émigrés in Ban- galore, Karachi and Jakarta away from the U.S.
More than one U.S. tech recruiter has warned clients that persuading brown-skinned talent to immigrate to California just got tougher as of Nov. 8.
California lawmakers are prepared to become a “rebel state,” as Texas was in relentlessly blocking the initiatives of the Obama Administration for eight years.
But that might not be enough to keep California on top. Between 2001and 2011, the state lost 33 per cent of its manufacturing base, or 613,000 jobs. The state’s K-12 schools, starved for funds since a 1978 tax revolt, have gone from near-best to near-worst in North America. California also ranks poorly in high school Internet access. No wonder California is so reliant on top talent from abroad.
Can Duruk, a Turkey native and a software engineer at Uber, told Bloomberg recently that he plans to stay in Silicon Valley, having just obtained his green card. But he is uneasy. “This country has just elected someone who was more or less openly racist at points,” Duruk said. “It feels like a punch in the stomach.”
What disturbs Valley executives’ sleep is that if the likes of Duruk weren’t already in the U.S., would they have opted to go there, when growing tech centres like Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary — each of them recruiting tech talent worldwide as never before — are so much more welcoming? dolive@thestar.ca