Within Silicon Valley, there’s a low-grade yet persistent anxiety on the minds of, well, nearly everyone, and it boils down to one question:
Are we losing our place as the geographic center of the global tech industry?
That’s not paranoia.
The Bay Area’s 20 biggest tech employers grew their workforces three times faster outside the U.S. than they did here from January 2019 through July 2025, an analysis by Joint Venture Silicon Valley shows.
“While we’re the undisputed center of innovation, there’s a risk of losing that to Austin or China or wherever,” says San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. “I want to make sure Silicon Valley stays geographically here in Silicon Valley.”
How?
The Bay Area’s largest city is investing in highly educated immigrants.
“Education and immigration, that’s the Silicon Valley formula,” says Mahan.
But as he tries to open doors to the world’s best and brightest, President Donald Trump’s spasmodic fusillades of executive actions targeting immigrants and higher education risk sabotaging the valley’s — and America’s — AI ambitions.
Common Thread
To understand the importance of highly educated immigrants to Silicon Valley’s future, consider what happened when Mahan tried to incentivize the most promising early-stage startups to grow in San Jose.
Of 170 applicants, the city recently selected four companies to receive small cash grants and free services, including legal, real estate and IT support.
Of the four startups’ five founders, four are immigrants (they came from China, Kenya, South Korea and Israel). The only founder born in the U.S. is the son of Indian immigrants. All five founders have college degrees. Four of them attended graduate school.
The Bay Area’s growing concentration of immigrants and the highly educated have turned the region into one of the most productive on the planet.
Average income in the San Jose metro was only $927 higher than the national average in 1969; today, it’s $78,080 higher.
Immigrants and the educated aren’t reviled here. They’re revered as critical components of capitalism. After all, they’re creating big businesses, high-paying jobs and more wealth for shareholders than the world has ever seen.
Of 500 U.S. billion-dollar startups, 44% of their founders are foreign born. And 70% of the founders of the largest 100 unicorns have advanced degrees.
Cut nose, spite face
But Silicon Valley’s AI dreams are now in jeopardy, and for no good reason.
The twin pillars of its success — higher education and skilled immigrants — are under siege by a president who won back power by appealing to lower-educated and xenophobic voters.
Trump’s Education Department, led by the former head of a fake wrestling league who seemed to confuse AI with A1 Steak Sauce, has frozen billions in federal research and university grants; cut student aid programs; harassed professors with investigations under the disingenuous guise of fighting antisemitism; and extorted ideological conformity in curricula by withholding federal funds.
Meanwhile, the president’s departments of Homeland Security and State have detained and deported foreign students who expressed pro-Palestinian viewpoints; revoked thousands of student visas and threatened to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students and STEM scholars.
Bay Area universities are feeling the pain.
So far this year, UC Berkeley has lost 66 federal awards and $44 million. Stanford University has lost more than $100 million. And San Jose State — a key source of engineering talent for the region’s AI startups — has lost 25 awards and more than $6 million in federal funds.
Bay Area university leaders know things might get much worse. The president wants control over what is taught at universities and who is teaching. And he’ll come for them. Administrators at local universities all know that tax audits, civil rights investigations and ICE raids are just one Truth Social post away.
So they’re staying quiet.
Pipeline cracking
The anti-college, anti-immigrant fever that’s taken over this country has affected this fall’s enrollment.
The number of international students who traveled to the U.S. dropped by 19% in August, according to the New York Times, which called that “the largest decline on record outside the pandemic.”
These changes are weighing on the minds of AI startup founders. Of particular concern is the president’s abrupt executive order restricting H-1B visas, designed for highly skilled labor. An application that once cost between $3,000 to $5,000 is now $100,000, making the cost of talent out of reach for many early-stage startups.
“The new H-1B visa ruling is horrible,” said Reetam Ganguli, whose maternal health company Elythea won a grant from San Jose’s AI startup contest and employs a PhD engineer with an H-1B.
“They’re crippling Silicon Valley’s efforts to recruit talent. …To scale, I need engineers. And if you’re looking at machine learning engineers, over 80% are Asian — either Indian or Chinese.”
AI infrastructure startup Clika’s co-founder Nayul Kim of South Korea secured a visa, along with her Israeli co-founder husband, in September, shortly after they received an award from Mahan’s startup contest. While Kim has no concerns about her own legal status, she does wonder whether the current national climate will make it harder to find talent in the Bay Area.
“We want top students to choose the best schools in the U.S. instead of the best in China,” she said.
Moving to China might be a hard sell for high-skilled foreign talent. But other countries, including Canada and Germany, are hoping to seize on America’s self-destruction to grow their own AI sectors. “The European Union,” Politico reports, “is tripping over itself” to poach scholars and students spurned by the president’s purges.
As long as the federal government continues attacking Bay Area universities and immigrants, the valley’s AI dreams and America’s technological edge will erode.
“Our national success in economic and military power will come down to innovation, and it’s going to be driven by talent,” says Mahan.
“I fear our president might not understand how pivotal immigration and education are to American success. The Trump administration seems like it’s cutting its nose to spite its face. … It’s suicidal.”
Reach Deputy Opinion Editor Max Taves at mtaves@bayareanewsgroup.com.