As the president of the United States disparages immigrants, it’s important to note that they are more valuable to the U.S. than ever.
Immigrants and their children have helped found 60 percent of the most highly valued tech companies in the U.S., Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker told the Code Conference last year in her annual internet trends report. Right now those companies — which include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook — have a combined market value of $3.8 trillion. That’s up about $800 million since we checked on those companies last summer.
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These tech companies — and all of Silicon Valley — also rely on immigration to staff their businesses to compensate for a shortage of tech workers in the U.S.
Nearly 70 percent of high-skill H-1B visas approved in 2016, the latest year for available data, went to people in computer-related fields, according to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
