Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship 2016 Forces of Change: Silicon Valley's Developing Relationship with American Government Marissa C. Mirbach Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Mirbach, Marissa C., "Forces of Change: Silicon Valley's Developing Relationship with American Government" (2016). CMC Senior Theses. Paper 1341. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1341 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you by Scholarship@Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in this collection by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Claremont McKenna College Forces of Change: Silicon Valley’s Developing Relationship with American Government Submitted to Professor Kenneth Miller And Dean Nicholas Warner by Marissa Mirbach For Senior Thesis 2015-2016 April 25, 2016 1 Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………. 3 Chapter 1: A Brief History of the Tech Industry…………………………………. 6 Chapter 2: The Place Without a Past: Silicon Valley Today…………………… 11 Chapter 3: The Valley and Government…………………………………………..18 Chapter 4: Education: The Playing Field Tilts West……………………………..33 Chapter 5: Immigration: Silicon Valley’s Political Limits Revealed……………56 Chapter 6: Encryption: The People Will Decide………………………………….74 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...86 2 Introduction Welcome to the place formerly known as The Valley of Heart’s Delight. Once suffused with the scent of apricots from its bountiful orchards, the region roughly bounded by San Francisco to the North and San Jose to the South is the womb for the planet’s most disruptive technologies. This is Silicon Valley. David Howell, of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, thinks it is the earth that is different around here.