Silicon Valley’s Strengths: Open Information Flow and Immigration: a presentation to the Guangzhou Dialogue with Silicon Valley Mountain View Vice-Mayor Lenny Siegel
September 21, 2017
I am honored today, on behalf of the city of Mountain View and the other communities of Silicon Valley, to welcome our guests from Guangzhou. While China has a history extending millennia, the San Francisco Bay Area has been densely settled for no more than 240 years. The concept of Silicon Valley is only 46 years old, yet now around the globe our region is synonymous with technological innovation.
The San Francisco Peninsula was already home to many electronics and aerospace companies in the late 1950s and 1960s, when the commercial semiconductor industry emerged in Mountain View and then neighboring communities. In 1957, eight key employees left Shockley Semiconductor, founded by one of the Bell Labs inventors of the transistor, to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Both were located in Mountain View. For many years, just about every major chipmaker in Silicon Valley, including Intel and National Semiconductor, was formed by people who had worked at Fairchild or its spin-off firms.
In 1971, Electronics News documented this “Silicon Valley Family Tree,” introducing the term Silicon Valley to the public at large. It used the term “Silicon” because the wafers – that is, thin smooth disks – from which micro-chips are made start out as pure silicon, made from sand.
The industry flourished because the U.S. government had required Bell Labs to share its patents, and because engineers and managers carried knowledge from company to company. In my 1985 book, The High Cost of High Tech, I wrote:
High Technology within the United States is an industry that has thrived upon the open flow of information. How could new companies devise remarkable new products without access to the ideas and experience of established firms? In Silicon Valley, the word ‘trade’ in ‘trade secrets’ is a verb.
Fast forward to today: The semiconductor wafer fabrication factories are gone, leaving behind hundreds, maybe thousands of acres of contaminated groundwater and the name Silicon Valley. Software and design firms such as Google now stand on the land originally developed by Fairchild Semiconductor.
So the work has changed but the fundamental principle remains. Silicon Valley still thrives on the open flow of information. Companies cluster their offices to promote the exchange of ideas among engineers working on disparate projects. Major business from outside the area – Microsoft, Toyota, Samsung, BBK, etc. – have set up shop in Mountain View to harvest those ideas. And employees from the big firms have generated a steady stream of start-ups, many of which have become household names.
But this success has brought problems that could undermine the success. One of my colleagues calls these the “perils of prosperity.” We have a problem that everyone else wants: too many good jobs – for our housing supply and transportation network.
Rents are skyrocketing. Home prices are out of reach for all but the richest first- time homebuyers. People with decent jobs are living in recreational vehicles on our streets. To afford a home – the “American dream” – or even rent, workers drive for hours, clogging our freeways and roadways, generating large volumes of greenhouse gases.
It falls on local government to solve these problems. In Mountain View, we are planning to expand our housing supply by more than half. We are investing in transit and improving our bicycle infrastructure. But many Silicon Valley residents believe that our rapid pace of development is undermining our quality of life. Not all of our neighboring communities are following the same path as Mountain View.
I believe that our communities must partner with our businesses and workers to solve these problems or Silicon Valley will go the way of other formerly thriving American metropolises, such as Detroit or Rochester. It won’t be easy, but we need to harness the creativity that brought us the Internet, personal computer, and smart phone to create smart communities.
There is another threat to Silicon Valley: National policies and attitudes that fail to understand that immigration is a key element in our success. We treasure diversity. We tolerate – indeed encourage dissent – and we welcome immigrants and guest workers. Someone in Washington, DC should learn from our experience.
38% of the residents of Silicon Valley are foreign born. Two-thirds of our young tech workers were born outside the United States. Of course, many of them are from China. Here there are almost as many people of Asian descent as of European descent, and we have a growing number of families of mixed heritage.
If you know anything about California history, Chinese participated in our Gold Rush of the mid-19th Century and labored under challenging circumstances to build our first railroads. Stanford University, perhaps the institution most responsible for the Community of Technical Scholars that became Silicon Valley, was created by a man, Leland Stanford, who gained his wealth on the backs of those railroad workers.
For more than a century, many Californians feared and despised Chinese and other immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act and the Imprisonment of most of our Japanese-American community during World War II are blots on our history.
But this year, as our new national administration has attempted to impose policies punishing immigrants, guest workers, and refugees, Silicon Valley has united in opposition. Our big companies, our small businesses, our elected officials, and our civic society all recognize that the contributions of people from Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere make our culture, political life, and economy stronger.
So it is no accident that we recognize that China and Chinese companies are our partners. At times we compete, just as businesses here compete. But now China is the manufacturing engine that provides the hardware for what is often designed here. Furthermore, our success depends upon the continuing exchange of ideas between us.
There is one more reason that many of the best and brightest minds from throughout the world flock to the San Francisco Bay Area: our weather. Despite climate change, this is a great place to enjoy the outdoors, almost year-round. So I hope that while you are here you are able to sample not only our food and our technology, but our natural environment.
Welcome!