Gen X, Vic 20, and hi-tech immigration
Introduction
This post focuses on Gen X immigrants and their role in building out the modern hi-tech world in which Millennial and Generation Z demographic cohorts are “digital natives,” e.g. the leaders of Tesla, Palantir, Google, and Microsoft. The focus is meant to be demographic and not any type of political or company endorsement.
“Over 50% of billion dollar startups to-date have at least one immigrant founder [xviii].”
Generation X (Gen X) were born from 1965 to 1980. 22% of the 55 million strong US Gen X cohort are immigrants [i]. The corresponding figure for Millennial immigrants is only 15%. Millennials, however, are more likely to be the child of at least one immigrant parent.
Full disclosure — the blog author is Gen X and an immigrant from England via the skilled worker program before naturalization. He has been online for decades thanks to home computers, BBS, and Mosaic/Netscape as a youngling.
General US immigration — quick review of the past
The US is a nation of immigrants, with population growth coming from native born inhabitants and new arrivals. The US has more immigrants than any other country in the world [iii]. Historically, those arrivals came across land borders, or by boat willingly from Europe, or unwillingly from Africa.
The modern era of US immigration began with the federal “National Origins Formula” of 1924 [iv] that cut back immigrant numbers from what had been hundreds of thousand per year to just 150,000 visa holders each year. Its focus was primarily on immigration from Western and Northern Europe, excluding Asians and non-whites.
The Boomer era “Immigration and Nationality Act” of 1965 [v] repealed immigration restrictions based on race and national origins. The effects of the changes can be seen both in growing numbers of immigrants and the growing diversity of the US population.
The 1965 act allowed up to 20,000 applicants per year from every country, not just Western and Northern Europe, using categories of family reunification (75%), employment (20%) and refugee status (5%). However, there was no provision for workers in sectors like agriculture, construction, or domestic work, which over time has fostered an underclass of “undocumented workers.”
General US immigration — quick review of the future
Popular US attitudes regarding immigrants have always swung between narratives of inclusion in a “melting pot” of diversity and calls for exclusion to prevent the US from becoming a “dumping ground.”
There is a striking change in the mix of these attitudes tied to evolving demographics. Gen X and Millennials today are much more broadly in favor of immigration than the less diverse Boomers and the Silent Generation before them.
In politics, Boomer President Biden celebrates his Irish heritage [vi]. Boomer President Trump celebrates his German heritage [vii]. Vice President Kamala D. Harris (and now Presidential candidate) was born in the last 2 years of the Boomer era. Both her parents are immigrants and academics, with a mother from India and a father from at the time colonial British Jamaica.
Irrespective of the political narratives of the 2024 US presidential election cycle, the Economist Magazine reported in April 2024 that the US’ most recent surge in immigration after COVID means that “its economy will be 2% larger over the next decade than had been forecast.” [viii]
Generational core values
Foreign born Gen X still have Boomers and the Silent Generation as their parents. Their experiences are both the same as natives and also influenced by their experiences outside of the US.
For example, Pew reports [ix] that Gen X Immigrants are 69% Christian, 5% Hindu, 4% Muslim, 1% Buddhist, 1% Jewish, and fully 20% have no religious affiliation.
The Gen X Immigrants represent a wider group of religions than native born Gen X. This extends even to a different fragmentation of Christian denominations within the majority group, e.g., there are more Catholics than Protestants in the immigrant cohort. Fully 1 in 5 having no religious affiliation.
Effectively Gen X immigrants foreshadow a greater diversity in beliefs and the growing secularization in society today. The Atlantic Magazine in 2017 talked about CrossFit gyms starting to fulfill the previous role of religion in our modern society [x].
Significant life events
The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 [xi] brought a humanitarian disaster in Vietnam as the North and South re-united and the US’ supporters were purged. More than a million Vietnamese adult and child refugees were accepted into the US between 1975 and 1995, most visibly the “boat people” of the late 1970s and early 1980s [xii].
When the author worked with the US Air Force Academy (AFA) a few years ago, the CIO at the time had been a Vietnamese refugee and a member of Gen X [xiii]. He had later joined the US Air Force in gratitude for his family’s rescue, rising to become a Colonel. This was at a time when native interest in the military was at historical lows. His son and daughter are now successful AFA students.
A generation earlier, a swathe of the Manhattan Project scientists were refugees, and many were Jewish [xiv]. In my home county, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) played a huge role in AIDS research directly effecting Gen X.
Today, NIH has an extremely diverse research community (46% are nonwhite and non-Hispanic [xv]). Local housing covenants as late as the 1950s had prevented African American, Jewish, and Muslim families from having ownership [xvi].
The lows of the Gen X era like the worldwide AIDS epidemic and NASA challenger disaster were felt around the world. The highs, like the dawning of the Internet revolution were particular draws for those interested in academia and business opportunity.
How they were raised
Outside of family reunification visas which tended to mirror existing Gen X demographics, and the refugees discussed above, the greatest influence on the Gen X immigration cohort has been education and ties to the hi-tech industry.
US immigration visa preference under the “H1B” process was granted to workers with advanced skills and also to foreigners achieving a master’s degree from a US university. However, the process has been revised in more recent years, to prevent a focus on quantity over quality.
The effect of an academics and hi-tech skills selection process can be most visibly seen in the Information Technology (IT) sector and most famously the sale of the payment startup PayPal to eBay in 2002 [xvii]. Its founders were all young, highly educated, and about to receive millions of dollars that they could then reinvest into other startups.
Prominent among the “PayPal Mafia” were Gen X immigrant Elon Musk from South Africa and Peter Thiel from Germany. They went on to build successful companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and Palantir. Over 50% of billion dollar startups to-date have at least one immigrant founder [xviii].
A similar effect can be seen with the Indian born CEOs [xix] of today’s Microsoft and Google, where these Gen X immigrants were able to navigate the cultural and political barriers in more mature companies rather than simply starting new businesses. Effectively Gen X immigrants foreshadow the higher education, diversity, and business pragmatism of later generations like Gen Z.
Cultural memorabilia of their time
Gen X immigrants such as Elon Musk learned their skills on American home computers such as the Vic 20 [xx] that sold globally at scale, had full color graphics, and were much more affordable than the Apple and IBM machines of the era.
A generation earlier, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft, had had to attend one of the most elite schools in the US to have access to a computer in 1968 [xxi].
Heroes of this generation
Elon Musk is a hero to Gen X at least for his influence on technology. He is the personification of Gen X immigrants, with an outside influence on business, technology and also the media both directly and via his social media platform X (previously Twitter).
He is strongly influenced by the Boomer generation, in seeking to perfect technology tropes from ’60s science fiction culture like advanced automobiles, spaceships, and intelligent computers. That Boomer culture shaped the Gen X immigration cohort, especially focusing on technology into the boom era of Dot Coms, biological (DNA biotech) and financial technology (derivatives fintech) in the late 1990s.
By 2007, popular TV shows like “The Big Bang Theory”[xxii] celebrated this culture with Millennials and Gen Z. Police forensics shows of the era celebrated DNA analysis and mass spectroscopy as much as traditional detective work.
Want to know more? References
[i] Pew Research Center. (2011, November 3). The Generation Gap and the 2012 election. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2011/11/03/the-generation-gap-and-the-2012-election-3/
[ii] Connor, P. (2016, May 18). 5 facts about the U.S. rank in worldwide migration. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/05/18/5-facts-about-the-u-s-rank-in-worldwide-migration/
[iii] Connor, P. (2016, May 18). 5 facts about the U.S. rank in worldwide migration. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/05/18/5-facts-about-the-u-s-rank-in-worldwide-migration/
[iv] Network, Laws. com. (2023, September 23). National origins act. Immigration. https://immigration.laws.com/national-origins-act
[v] Immigration and nationality act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act). Immigration History. (2019, September 27). https://immigrationhistory.org/item/hart-celler-act/
[vi] ABC News Network. (2024, July 21). ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-irish-roots-visits-ancestral-homeland/story?id=98472620
[vii] McGrane, S. (2016, April 29). The ancestral German home of the Trumps. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-ancestral-german-home-of-the-trumps
[viii] The Economist Newspaper. (2014, April 30). Immigration is surging, with big economic consequences. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/30/immigration-is-surging-with-big-economic-consequences
[ix] Pew Research Center. (2015, May 12). Religious landscape study. Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/generational-cohort/generation-x/immigrant-status/immigrants/
[x] Beck, J. (2017, June 24). How CrossFit acts like a religion. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/the-church-of-crossfit/531501/
[xi] Cohn, D. (2015, September 30). How U.S. immigration laws and rules have changed through history. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/09/30/how-u-s-immigration-laws-and-rules-have-changed-through-history/
[xii] A&E Television Networks. (n.d.). How the end of the Vietnam War led to a refugee crisis. History.com. https://www.history.com/news/vietnam-war-refugees
[xiii] “Opportunity exists everywhere”: Academy’s top IT official retires, tells story of family. United States Air Force Academy. (n.d.). https://www.usafa.af.mil/News/Features/Article/3056465/opportunity-exists-everywhere-academys-top-it-official-retires-tells-story-of-f/
[xiv] Scientist refugees and the Manhattan project. Nuclear Museum. (n.d.). https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/scientist-refugees-and-manhattan-project/
[xv] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2022, November 14). National Institutes of Health Workforce Demographics. National Institutes of Health. https://www.nih.gov/ending-structural-racism/national-institutes-health-nih-workforce-demographics
[xvi] Diamond, J. (2023, June 22). “Not in my neighborhood” A Montgomery County project maps the story of antisemitic, racist housing laws. Washington Jewish Week. https://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/not-in-my-neighborhood-a-montgomery-county-project-maps-the-story-of-antisemitic-racist-housing-laws/
[xvii] Oreskovic, A. (2024, July 21). The PayPal Mafia still rules Silicon Valley. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2024/07/21/paypal-mafia-silicon-valley-thiel-hoffman-botha-rabois-musk/
[xviii] LLP, F. (2019, April 18). 55% of America’s billion-Dollar startups have an immigrant founder. Foster Global. https://www.fosterglobal.com/blog/55-of-americas-billion-dollar-startups-have-an-immigrant-founder/
[xix] Lake, R. (n.d.). Top Indian CEOS. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/10-top-indian-ceos-7487331
[xx] Kubba, H. (2020, May 5). Chapter 1-The Making of Elon Musk. https://successdecoded.substack.com/p/chapter-1the-making-of-elon-musk
[xxi] Magoo, N. (2020, November 30). An interesting story about Bill Gates. Medium. https://nishankmagoo.medium.com/an-interesting-story-about-bill-gates-b5dc6b922c93
[xxii] IMDb.com. (2007, September 24). The Big Bang Theory. IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898266/
