My company tries to hire the best person we can find for any given job. And it just so happens that a lot of the best people turn out to not be American. Add to that the fact that we’re running a global business marketing to customers all over the world where local expertise can be useful, and you end up with employees from all over: US, Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, etc.
And all we want is a place in the world where we can all stay for an extended period of time and work together, and it seems crazy that it’s so hard! Immigration laws are weird.
Like things that have happened in the four months since I moved to Hong Kong:
- walking to work and passing smashed and burned-out storefronts from the previous night’s riots
- my coworkers getting tear gassed
- having to get my temperature checked every time I want to enter my apartment building
- apparently there’s a toilet paper shortage now
and yet Hong Kong is still just clearly a better place for us to be running a business than the US, on many dimensions. I’m impressed how badly the US has fucked this up, and surprised by what proportion of world-changing startups are nonetheless headquartered there.
can you talk more about how hong kong is a better place to run a business? is this mostly a regulatory environment thing or something else?
Yeah, the US just has so many regulations.
Some of them, like caps on H1B visas, I really disagree with but at least I kind of understand. I think laws against what is essentially a transaction between two consenting people are a priori likely to be bad, and this issue feels like something there should even be bipartisan agreement on–but also immigration is a hot-button issue, and I guess people have a lot of feelings about it.
But then there’s other areas where no one in the public is even paying attention to them, and it’s clear the process of creating regulations is not anything like “find problems, try to fix them” or even “punish things that public opinion thinks are bad.” It’s “I am a regulator in the Department of Regulating X, and so I am going to write some regulations on X.”
And that’s if you’re lucky; the more likely case is that they haven’t written any regulations on X at all yet, because X has only been around for five years, but they are studying X closely and in another year they will emerge with a case against a bunch of people doing X because obviously X falls under some definition of wire fraud or something. So if you want to do anything remotely innovative you have to hire a bunch of expensive lawyers who will patiently repeat to you that no, there is actually no law here you can just follow and be good, there’s a bunch of competing overlapping heuristics and there’s industry standards and there’s vaguely related historical precedents and at the end of the day you make a guess and hope for the best.
And of course, in addition to the federal government there’s fifty different states that all want to be special so they all make their own different regulations.
Sure, the Hong Kong government isn’t perfect, they might resort to authoritarian measures to quell protests or whatever. But at least that keeps them busy, you know? The US government clearly just has so much time on their hands.