Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

But if Packard couldn’t win the war, then at least he could get a new low-wage group of employees. It’s not a coincidence that the South Bay maintains the country’s largest concentration of Vietnamese immigrants to this day: Silicon Valley firms were ready to absorb thousands of refugee workers at the same time and for the same reason they were refugees in the first place.ii War spending jump-started the civilian electronics industry both by funding R & D and by bombing a new cohort of Asian workers onto the California production lines.