President-elect Donald Trump - Where Do We Go From Here?

Step 1 – Admit that we lost.
President-elect Donald Trump will be our leader for the next four years. Yes, he’s our president.

Step 2 – Admit why we lost.
Many of us feel like outsiders in our own country right now. Perhaps we can empathize with all those that felt like this for the past few years. The truth is that many have felt disenfranchised by the Democratic party. While some of us had one priority in mind – defeat Donald trump, a majority of us had other priorities. We didn’t lose this election because half of America are racist, sexist, homophobic bigots who can’t have a female president. Over half of the country did vote for her, in fact. The reasons we lost this election are more complicated than that.

We lost this election when the Democratic National Convention and major media outlets like CNN worked secretly with a campaign, giving that campaign advanced knowledge of questions that would be asked at debates and consorted with that campaign to produce favorable stories in the media for that campaign and negative stories for the opposing campaign.

We lost this election when blue collar workers across America expressed their frustration with politics, as usual, the status quo, the political elite, and income inequality and the Democratic party proceeded to tip the scales for a candidate who represented all those things.

We lost the election when the candidate the DNC chose for us was polling with the second lowest favorable ratings in the history of polling, when she consistently showed weakness in the electoral college against every single Republican opponent, and they installed her anyways.

We lost when the candidate the DNC selected failed to provide reasons to vote FOR her and simply provided reasons to vote against her opponent.

We lost this election when the DNC chose the less electable candidate to represent the Democratic party.

Step 3 – Take Action
The Democratic Party has failed us. The results of this election, ultimately, lie squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic party establishment. It is of utmost importance that the party elite will relinquish the reigns. It is time for the Sanders/Warren Democrats – the millennials and the socialists, the future of our nation, to take control of the direction of the party.

In 2008, after the election of President Obama, the Republican party began to be seized by a people-powered movement called the Tea Party. In 2016, the Democrats should see the very same type of reaction from their constituency. A rebuke of the party establishment and a seizing of control by the voters, rather than the party elite, should take place.

Socialist, populist, progressives all across America need to take up service to their country and run for election to local, state, and federal offices. This is of dire importance to securing our future.

Finally: All Democrats in Congress should meet President Trump and the Republican held House and Senate with the very same opposition that President Obama and the Democrats met with. It is very important that we extend this message to our representatives: We do not want you to work with the President. We do not want you to work across the aisle. We want progressive legislation or nothing. When one party refuses to play by the rules, we are left with no choice but to do the same. We can not get progressive legislation through by trying to play nice. We must learn from the Republican precedent and meet obstruction with obstruction.
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Before last night I had felt disillusioned with the Democratic Party. I felt betrayed when I saw the DNC tip the scales of the election and then saw what I already knew to be true, validated through the Wikileaks email hacks. I was entirely prepared to leave politics behind.

But seeing a misogynistic, racist, bigot rise to the most powerful station on Earth has moved me. Knowing that my daughters will have to grow up STILL without having known a female leader of the free world breaks my heart.

My friend told me today that when she woke her daughter up for school, her daughter asked her “Mommy, are we going to be deported?”

My sister and her wife watched the election results with fear and anticipation, as they wondered if what became an increasingly likely President Trump would install a Supreme Court Justice that would repeal marriage equality.

On campus, I saw two black women embrace each other in front of me, one in tears, as they asked each other where they go from here.

The results of yesterday’s election affect each and every one of us deeply and profoundly – whether we know it yet or not. And I have never been more resolved to work my ass off to elect PROGRESSIVE, honest, liberal, Democrats to local, state, and federal offices. 2018 starts today. Are you in?

America’s Loss is the World’s Gain

Vivek Wadhwa

Fellow, Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University

Recently, President Obama made a startling concession to the Republican Party: that he would accept a piecemeal approach to overhauling America’s immigration system. "If they want to chop that thing up into five pieces, as long as all five pieces get done, I don't care what it looks like", Mr. Obama said.

This is startling because, for the past few years, Democratic Party leaders have insisted on an all-or-nothing approach to immigration. They would not agree to increase the numbers of visas for skilled workers unless the Republicans agreed to legalize the more than 10 million immigrants who are in the country without documentation. The Republicans refused to provide “amnesty” to the unskilled, so the Democrats let the skilled immigrants — and U.S. competitiveness — suffer. This is no different from the juvenile behavior you see in other democracies.

The President realizes the political reality and is trying to get whatever he can through the system. But it is unlikely that he will have any success on immigration, because House leaders are still reeling from their loss on the fiscal shutdown and will not hand the President any kind of political victory.

This is bad for the U.S. but is good news for countries such as India, China, and Brazil. That’s because the U.S. has been giving these countries an unintended gift: highly educated and skilled workers with experience in U.S. markets. It has been sending would-be immigrants back home, exporting its competitive edge.

Immigrants have always given America its economic advantage. Skilled immigrants made it into a technology superpower. Wave after wave came to America’s shores and brought with them their education, knowledge of global markets, and determination to achieve success. They made the natives think smarter and work harder and contributed to practically all of its technology breakthroughs.



Over the past three decades, immigrants have been fuelling the majority of Silicon Valley’s innovation and growth. My research team at Duke, Harvard, and UC-Berkeley documented that from 1995 to 2005, immigrants founded 52% of Silicon Valley startups, and 25% of startups nationwide (read this research paper). They contributed to 72% of the WIPO patents filed by Qualcomm, 65% of those by Merck, 64% of General Electric, and 60% of Cisco Systems. Incredibly, 40% of the international patent applications filed by the U.S. Government also had foreign-national authors (more data here).

Indians thrive in Silicon Valley. They have founded 33.2% of its immigrant-founded startups—more than immigrants from any other ten countries combined have, including China, the U.K., Canada, Germany, Israel, and Russia. Indians also co-author 13.7% of America’s global patents.

Despite this amazing contribution, the U.S. is allowing itself to bleed competitiveness. It admits hundreds of thousands of students and workers on H1-B visas, but it doesn’t provide enough permanent-resident visas to let these skilled foreigners make the U.S. their new home. The result is that there are more than a million skilled immigrants and their families stuck in “immigration limbo”. The U.S. only issues about 140,000 permanent-resident visas to educated and skilled workers per year, and there is a 7% per-country limit. This means that applicants from high-population countries such as India, China, and Brazil get the same numbers of visas as those from Bhutan and Mauritius do: about 10,000. It takes decades for people from these countries to become permanent residents. While they wait, they are generally stuck in the same position with the same employer.

I explained the reverse brain drain that is in progress and the consequences of this in my book The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent. In a nutshell, because of improving opportunities in countries such India, China, and Brazil — and out of frustration with the delay in visa processing — the tide has turned. Skilled workers are returning home in record numbers. In research that my group at Stanford completed recently, we found that the proportion of companies founded in Silicon Valley from 2006 to 2012 that had been founded by immigrants had fallen to 44%. This was not because immigrants had become less entrepreneurial, but because they could not get the visas necessary for starting companies.

America’s loss has been a huge gain for other countries. If you visit any top Chinese research lab, you will find returnees from the U.S. at their helm. The tech centers of both India and China are growing rapidly with the infusion of Silicon Valley-trained talent. These returnees are bringing America’s best practices and entrepreneurial culture back home with them.

American leaders are well aware of the damage that the brain drain is doing to U.S. competitiveness. The President has cited my research in his speeches, and I have been asked to testify to both the House and Senate. The problem is that in addition to the issue of amnesty, there is also a xenophobic element in the U.S. that wants to keep foreigners out. And there are technology workers prevented from getting jobs by their location, age, or skills. They are all rallying against immigrants and complicating the factional battles in Congress. This is creating the stalemate.

So America’s loss is the world’s gain.

You can also follow me on Twitter and read more of my articles on my website: www.wadhwa.com.