first of all I want to thank you for your interest and continued dedicated efforts. I am an Australian currently parked in Canada undergoing a lot of similar issues which I will make some time to write about for the first round startup visa thing now that I’ve just seen it

I also think it is just as much a responsibility for potential startup visa candidates/immigrants to care about and help fix the state of immigration abuse/cockblocks in the US since in the long run we’re all in the same boat. If you seek to become American, then it makes sense to help Americans, contrary to this whole care about yourself and your visa first (even if an American loses their job) attitude that I’ve seen from a lot of people.

The problem is that the H1-B is the only way, and everything gets funneled through their from companies who want to use it legitimately (especially smaller companies which NEED the help and talent and are hurt more if they cant get it) , to the body shops, to people who legitimately only want to work temporarily. It is unfair to put the whole category as a sham visa to be gamed, just as it is equally unfair and naive to say that everyone using it is using for the ‘intent’ of the visa.

H1-B really needs to be broken up and rethought, as does the whole system and immigration in general. Thank you for waving the flag for this part of it

The data is clear on this. Immigrant founders are great for the economy. What’s broken is our Congress. Many legislators are not willing to do things that make sense for the country and the economy because of soundbite attacks and corruption.

I hope that the startup visa movement can help increase the pressure on congress to stand up and do something that makes sense.

You’ve helped me understand that focusing on EB-5 is the wrong thing. It’s not a good endgame. I don’t speak for anyone else, but it seems to me that the startup visa movement has not yet definitely settled on a desired endgame. This is all a work in progress.

I think one of the best things we can do is to muster the evidence that immigrant entrepreneurs are hugely net positive for the country. Make the evidence overwhelming. That’s why I created this wiki page listing American high-tech companies with immigrant founders:
http://wiki.nat.org/index.php/American_Startups_with_Immigrant_Founders

What are the next steps for the startup visa movement? Frankly there doesn’t seem to be a strategy yet. I’m glad you’re in this discussion because you’re dead right that amending EB-5 is a bandaid.

Like you mentioned, given the circumstances, there are available visa options to facilitate the entry of any number of qualified entrepreneurs. The problem is in making sure that such an entry is unconditional.

The startup visa proposal takes a theoretical approach to the problem of legal ENTRY into the US, skirting the immigration issue altogether. Even if the proposed visa were to be made immigrant by nature, it would hardly benefit anyone. For example, immigration numbers are limited per country. If I am from India or China and am not an established person in my field, I am looking at a minimum of 6-7 years before I could consider myself a permanent resident here. This is not a problem when you’re young and straight out from college. When you’re older, you cannot move along with your family just like that.

Really though, instead of bandaiding this mess, you should be trying to force the congress into adopting comprehensive immigration reform. That is the only true fix.

There is a segment of the population who focus on the negatives: that they will take away jobs, that they will place a burden on the welfare safety net, that they might be terrorists, etc. Politicians and certain media outlets then cater to that segment which often makes things worse.

The policies also have the effect of making the country less inviting to the people who could improve out community (e.g. why would a qualified Indian doctor want to relocate to Australia if there are reports of Indian university students being beaten up?).

Miguel’s visa problem certainly sounds like the product of these sort of policies, and a “Startup Visa” sounds like an attempt to treat one of the symptoms rather than the root problem.

So far, two other first-world, English-speaking countries (Canada and the UK) have issued me visas with comparatively little effort required, so I will improve their economies instead, I guess.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/10/chile-wants-your-poor-your-huddled-masses-your-tech-entrepreneurs/

$500,000 investment by the government over 5 years. Up to $30,000 in due diligence costs to explore setting up there. Up to $25,000 for training local talent. 40% (up to $2 million) to build office or labs there. If you give a foreigner a legit tech job, they get a visa without any bullshit. That all sounds pretty sweet.

It’s crazy to say no to this. You don’t want to say yes too fast, in case the US infrastructure is overwhelmed, but you should definitely not turn people away for economic reasons.

Having people in this country to work is such a amazing advantage economically-wise…

The problem that we face is not one of legal immigrates taking jobs, but of illegal immigration taking advantage of our medical system, abusing the laws of the country, and introducing higher rates of crime and disease.

I would like it if every person wanting into the country was a person that wanted to be production and make money for themselves and other people. However that is not always the case. You have a large influx of criminal orginization, for example, that come in with drug trafficking and that sort of thing. A full third of people in federal prisons are in this country illegally.

What illegal immigration does is that it introduces a second-class citizenship which people get prayed on by businesses and criminals and they have no legal recourse. These people are abused, do not get treated fairly, do not get benefits. Then it is up the rest of the society to take the burden of protecting and maintaining the community of these people who are (depending on the individual, of course) either unwilling or unable to take care of themselves.

Besides increases in crimes another negative effect is large increases of diseases.

In the USA we practically eliminated serious deceases like tuberculosis from our society. For something like 30-40 years you could count the number of serious infectious cases annually with your fingers. Now, however, we have the situations were people who cannot afford proper healthcare in Mexico come across to places like California and Texas and take advantage of our policies regarding emergency room care to get anti-biotics and that sort of thing. And since they are not part of the system and their employers completely ignore any health care benefits and things of that nature they do not carry out the required antibiotic regimen and do things like share the drugs with other infected people or only take the drugs until they feel better… we now have higher rates of TB and other highly infectious diseases in our intercities then what is found on the poorest third world nations… and not only that they are rapidly becoming drug resistant and virtually impossible to treat properly anymore.

You see the trick here is that if employers were actually required to document and import their workers legally then they would be forced to pay more taxes, provide housing, provide health care, have to deal with unions, proper worker environments, and will have people that won’t be scared to stand up for themselves.

So that is the game that is being played. The major corporate interests like illegal immigration since that means that they have access to work forces that are barely above slavery. The social engineering types like illegal immigration because that gives them a down-trodden work force that they can manipulate and use as political leverage to help forward their socialist agenda.

So both sides just avoid talking about the upsides and downsides and just work as hard as they can to prevent these people from ever becoming full-fledged citizens.

And it has nothing to do with Mexicans. These are the same issues that face any sort of foreign worker.

The real solution is to massively open up this country to proper legal immigrants who are actually interested in becoming full fledged citizens were businesses can bring them in and take care of them until they reach a level where they can become full members of our society while at the same time massively clamping down on illegal immigration; at the border, with government benefits, and in businesses.

Of course that is not going to happen since once you actually do something that will help solve the problem in a massive way people won’t have their political football and near-slavery workforce to kick around anymore.

The idea is that whoever enters the country and works, earns an income. That income would be used to consume, creating demand. Which in terms would create jobs to fulfill that demand. This is neither completely true, nor false. Quite often immigrants from poorer countries will send money abroad to their family. This will lead to more consumption in their country of origin. Whether that is a good thing, is up for debate.

The employment rate has nothing to do with it. Unemployment by it’s definition also includes those that are in the working population but don’t have to work and choose not to, because the they are rich. It includes those who choose to be unemployed and rip off the tax payers. But mostly unemployment is caused by a mismatch.

Because of that mismatch, even with high unemployment rates you will find companies unable to fill vacancies because of a shortage of properly trained candidates. While on the other hand people are unemployed because there are no jobs available they are trained for.

And a lot of people are very resistant against starting over in a complete new line of work. Especially if they liked the old one. I like this idea of a startup visa. Nat’s story makes me wonder what would have happened if this had been in an EU country.

We did also hire a lot of non-Americans and eventually had a pretty big Mexico City office:

http://nat.org/blog/2002/01/17-january-2002/

By the way, “visa” doesn’t just mean non-immigrant visa. There are immigrant visas that lead to permanent settlement, like the CR1 or IR1 visas.

Imagine if Brin were here on a temporary visa that required him to get a PhD and be successful, or go back to USSR. Would we still be having this debate?

The solution is to make IMMIGRATION easier, not just add another non-immigrant visa to the list of already incomprehensible options.