158 years ago Congress signed the Pacific Railroad Act. Less than 7 years later the ‘golden spike’ marked the completion of the project. Around 20,000 immigrant laborers had flattened a strip of earth between the Atlantic and the Pacific enough so that steam locomotives could drag wagons over two continuous parallel iron strips. 90 years after some agricultural colonies had seceded from their homeland the United States should become the industrial nation par excellence. The people building the railroad came from China in the west and from Europe in the east.
The tech industry in 2020 uses foreign labor too. Around 350,000 workers on an H1B visa are stuck outside of the US. That is allot of coders. There are smart people everywhere. Actual intelligence is distributed as a gaussian curve. (if you ask people about their own intelligence you’ll find a strange peak ‘above average’). India has a good education system. So lots of actual coders are from India. Code is the wrought iron of our age. If you would print the code that runs on your phone, then paper would fill a gym. Somebody had to write all that code. Most like she was born in Chhindwara and not in Chesapeake.
How much these people will be missed has to be seen. I think it will be allot. While all the code got written nobody cared how it came into being. That will change.