I have been arguing for some time that it is time to
fundamentally restructure our immigration policy in this country. We need to create a path for aspiring entrepreneurs to come in and help fuel our entrepreneurial economy. A new study from the Office of Advocacy of the SBA reinforces my point.
The study authored by David Hart, Zoltan Acs and Spencer Tracy found that sixteen percent of high-impact, high-tech firms have at least one immigrant founder. Although these firms are concentrated in states with large immigrant populations, in most other respects they resemble high-impact, high-tech firms founded by native-born entrepreneurs.
Moreover, these immigrant entrepreneurs are highly educated and appear to be strongly rooted in the United States. Roughly 55 percent of the foreign- born founders hold a masters degree or a doctorate. In addition, they are more than twice as likely as native-born founders to hold a doctorate.
Furthermore, 77 percent of the foreign-born high-tech entrepreneurs are American citizens and, on average, they have lived over 25 years in the United States. Two-thirds of them received their college degrees here, as well.
“Immigrant entrepreneurs clearly contribute a significant amount to our country’s cutting edge high-tech firms,” said Shawne McGibbon, acting Chief Counsel for Advocacy. “This report outlines these contributions and delivers important new data about immigrant entrepreneurs.”
Thank you so much for openly posting this on your site. I my self often get in argument about this, and I found my self against many hard minded people. Good luck with everything, i will make sure to recommend people to your site.
Well said. One way to “create a path for aspiring entrepreneurs to come in and help fuel our entrepreneurial economy” is to expand the existing EB-5 investors category to include entrepreneurs.
As it stands now, EB-5 only rewards people who have $500,000 to $1M already. What if a student has a brilliant idea, a workable plan, but no money? With a little funding they might go on to create another Google, but our immigration policy is designed to force such potential entrepreneurs to stay with an employer for many years just to earn a piece of green card, or go home.
At immigrationroad.com we have been calling for a change to the EB5 program for a long time, which, by the way, has been wasting visa numbers every year. And it is so easy even a caveman can do it: grant a conditional green card to a foreign entrepreneur who starts a company (no requirement on initial funding!) and hires 5 full-time employees within two years. If it doesn’t work out cancel the green card and the U.S. doesn’t lose anything. If it does, however, one card for five jobs, plus an entrepreneur and a growing business.
I was happy to come across this article! My son hah hired employees for his first start-up company from Germany and from Peru and it worked just as the article said! Both employees became American citizens, married and have lived here since the guest-worker program started. I do remember the paper work was “something else” and it definitely had to be stream-lined. Some small businesses didn’t want to make the effort because of the “difficulty” of the process.