More Outrage For Uber Than Immigrants: Tech Policy Is Still Local

When Washington D.C. threatened to raise the price of an Uber cab by a few dollars, the online community staged a full-fledged panic attack. Yet it barely whispered a peep of discontent when Congress introduced a bill to alleviate the high-skilled immigrant crunch for tech companies. Yesterday's defeat of the STEM Jobs Act, which would have added 55,000 visas for foreign-born science grads from American universities, illustrates an important lesson for those who think that netizens vote as a bloc for innovation issues: tech policy, like all policy, is local.

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