US Immigration Laws Drive Away Job-Creating “Foreigners”
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NBC’s Tom Brokaw visited Silicon Valley last winter to meet immigrant entrepreneurs.
At Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, he met with a dozen of them.
More than half said that they might be forced to return to their home countries.
That’s because they have the same visa issues that Kunal Bahl had.
Unable to get a visa that would allow him to start a company after he graduated from Wharton in 2007, Kunal returned home to India.
In February 2010, he started SnapDeal—India’s Groupon.
NBC’s Tom Brokaw visited Silicon Valley last winter to meet immigrant entrepreneurs.
At Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, he met with a dozen of them.
More than half said that they might be forced to return to their home countries.
That’s because they have the same visa issues that Kunal Bahl had.
Unable to get a visa that would allow him to start a company after he graduated from Wharton in 2007, Kunal returned home to India.
In February 2010, he started SnapDeal—India’s Groupon.
Instead of creating hundreds of jobs in the U.S., Kunal ended up creating them in New Delhi.
At a time when the US economy is stagnating, American political leaders are working to keep the world’s best and brightest out.
They mistakenly believe that skilled immigrants take American jobs away.
The opposite is true:
skilled immigrants start the majority of Silicon Valley startups;
they create jobs.
Meanwhile, entrepreneurship is booming in countries all over the world.
And more than half a million doctors, scientists, researchers, and engineers in the U.S. are stuck in “immigration limbo”.
They are on temporary work visas and are waiting for permanent-resident visas, which are in extremely short supply.
These workers can’t start companies, justify buying houses, or grow deep roots in their communities.
Once they get in line for a visa, they can’t even accept a promotion or change jobs.
They could be required to leave the U.S. immediately—without notice—if their employer lays them off.
Rather than live in constant fear and stagnate in their careers, many are returning home.
American immigration officials seem clueless:
• they do everything they can to make life miserable for immigrants who want to make the U.S. more competitive and create U.S. jobs;
• they interpret rules and regulations as restrictively as possible.
Rapportive co-founder, Martin Kleppmann, who came to the U.S. from Germany, told Brokaw
“In our case — we got a beautiful letter from the immigration service asking to prove that we had enough warehouse space to store our software inventory.
We don’t even have boxes of software, it’s all on the Internet.”
Sakina Arsiwala, from Mumbai, India, struggled for years to get a visa so that
she could work with her husband Naveen Koorakula on their social-networking startup, Campfire Labs.
“Why deal with all this, you know, old school immigration systems, just go where you’re wanted”,
said Arsiwala, who formerly headed YouTube’s international operations.
Michelle Zatlyn, a Canadian who founded Cloudflare, said that
American visa policies are very outdated and do not “promote entrepreneurship in this country at all”.
She told Brokaw that her startup was trying to create jobs and hire engineers,
but that the country had almost made her leave before she had an opportunity to build a company.
Aihui Ong, founder of Love With Food, spoke about America’s being under “technology attack”.
Everyone wants America’s techies.
Countries such as her home country, Singapore, are working hard to bring people like her back home,
as well as to attract skilled workers from other countries.
Singapore is giving some startups four dollars for every dollar they raise, she said.
Sakina Arsiwala added that living conditions in some other countries are “really really attractive”.
And the founder of Backtype, Mike Montano, spoke of his home country, Canada, offering startups major subsidies.
They all wonder why the U.S. makes it so hard for them though other countries roll out the welcome mat.
Unlike a lot of problems facing the US, this one is easy to fix:
It just needs to increase the numbers of permanent-resident visas available for those trapped in “immigration limbo”.
And it could create a Startup Visa that is more inclusive than the VC/Super Angel bill that is being proposed.
This may give the American economy a significant boost — at no cost to taxpayers, according to Tech Crunch.
