People are the most valuable resource. We see this most clearly among entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, and innovators. Creating wealth and new ways of doing things drive economic growth. This is especially true in the technology sector. Encouraged by free markets, individual liberty, and the right incentives, innovators can achieve technological wonders. But unfortunately, our immigration system limits their number.
Nowhere is the positive impact of immigrants more noticeable than in high tech startups. According to a survey by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants have started nearly half of the top 50 venture-funded companies. Software, semiconductors, and biotechnology are the most common venture-backed startup firms started by immigrants. According to another report by Vivek Wadhwa, roughly 25 percent of all engineering firms founded between 1995 and 2005 were founded by immigrants.
A report from the Kauffman Foundation shows that immigrants are more than twice as likely as native-born Americans to start firms. Thanks to America's entrepreneurial culture, stories like those of the Hungarian-born Andy Grove, who founded Intel, and the Soviet-born Sergey Brin, who founded Google, are common.
There are many thousands more who create successful but smaller companies. Entrepreneur Andres Ruzo, who describes himself as "Peruvian by birth, Texan by choice," started the telecommunications firm Link America in 1994. He is also working on ITS Infocom, which manages communication networks for large companies. His firms also expanded into Latin America by trying to, in Ruzo's own words, "Americanize South and Central America: to bring the culture of performance and results and speed and punctuality and quality and reliability to Latin America."
With rare exceptions, immigrant entrepreneurs face immigration problems. Employment-based green cards, capped at 140,000 a year, are issued to some kinds of skilled workers and investors, under strict country of origin quotas and burdensome requirements. The H-1B visa is capped at 85,000 per year for temporary workers employed by American firms. Many times H-1B workers are issued a green card after several years. All the while, the worker has to be an employee, not an entrepreneur.
Roughly a quarter of master's students and a third of Ph.D. students in science and engineering at U.S. universities are foreign-born. Yet the amount of paperwork, bureaucracy, and requirements they face to stay in the U.S. after graduation throw up serious roadblocks to innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovators and entrepreneurs should spend their time starting new businesses, not navigating a byzantine and outdated immigration system.
America is uniquely meritocratic. We attract the best and the brightest from around the world, but our immigration system gets in the way. The government expects a potential entrepreneur to prove that he or she is an entrepreneur before he or she can start a business. There is no stamp or marking that shows who will be a successful entrepreneur ex ante. Only experience, not government fiat, can determine that. Our immigration rules need to allow for those experiences.
Many immigrant workers innovate within American firms, filling niche specialty roles. Many are graduates of the best universities and technical schools in the world. Jim Clark, the American founder of Healtheon (now WebMD), Netscape (now part of AOL), and Silicon Graphic affectionately calls his Indian engineers "the most talented engineers in the Valley... and they work their butts off." American-educated Indian engineer Srikanth Nadhamuni and others produced some of the most innovative websites and medical cost saving tools yet developed. His story is multiplied thousands of times over, but for every success that is realized, our immigration laws impede another through arduous bureaucratic barriers.
Chia-Pin Chang, a Taiwanese native and Ph.D. in computer engineering from George Washington University, co-founded the medical device firm OptoBioSense. In addition to the burdensome government regulations on medical devices, Chang faces yet another obstacle: He has to close his business in February and move back to Taiwan if he cannot secure an employer-sponsored green card.
Iranian-born Esmaeil-Hooman Banaei created an electricity generating fabric while getting his Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida. Now he is waiting for a green card and a legal chance to pursue the American dream while developing new technology. His invention may flop or it may produce benefits, profits, revenues, and opportunities for Americans. But we'll never know if he doesn't get a green card.
Immigration links together the world's most valuable resources, allowing immigrant and Americans to work together. The immigrants then become Americans and the process continues, replenishing America's talent pool.
The government cannot choose who will become an innovator or entrepreneur before they get an opportunity to do so. Immigration regulatory limbo ties the hands of hundreds of thousands of potential entrepreneurs and innovators. Those knots should be undone. Immigrants and Americans working together have produced enormous wealth and opportunities for everybody in the United States. Governments just needs to let them.
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So, let's reform our H1B system to make it easier to bring in desirable legal immigrants, while going full out to get rid of all the illegal aliens and the traitors who hire them.
Harvard's Business School looked at the issue, from an objective viewpoint. "the research seemed to rule out the idea that the H-1B program was stealing jobs from born-and-bred Americans. But it also ruled out the opposing idea that the program created a huge number of jobs for Americans."
(http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6765.html)
In a market as competitive as the one now found in the U.S., where scientists and engineers have almost the same rate of unemployment as the general population (9%), there can be an impact of depressing wages, thus enabling subtle age discrimination by employers.
"Sophisticated critics of the H1-B program have argued that high-tech firms use the program as a means to keep their workers young and costs lower. There's no question that when you look across industries, the ones that are very immigration-dependent also have an average younger age than other industries." Steve Kerr, Associate Professor in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School, "The Supply Side of Innovation: H-1B Visa Reforms and US Ethnic Invention", http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6097.html
Hire and good Americans lately?
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/immigration-and-guest-worker-policies-undermining-us-tech-workers-finds-new-report-from-fair-133835948.html
Now our government seems to be refusing to enforce our immigration laws against students because someday the DREAM Act may pass. There have been several instances in the news lately of Illegal Immigrant Students apprehended during the commission of a crime yet allowed to remain in the USA pending completion of their studies. Yet Pelosi and Reid had no problem refusing to extend the expansion of opportunities for tens of thousands of American educated Foreign Students who came here legally and could be enriching this country now, but cannot stay because of the reduction in visas. That makes no sense – give those who broke the law a free pass while denying opportunity to young folks who followed the law and paid their own way.
Now along comes this author lamenting the fact that highly educated Foreign Students cannot stay in the USA. Where was he in 2007?
"Sophisticated critics of the H1-B program have argued that high-tech firms use the program as a means to keep their workers young and costs lower," he says. "There's no question that when you look across industries, the ones that are very immigration-dependent also have an average younger age than other industries."
Reference: (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6765.html)
I call B S.
definitely at the behest of a 1% house of representatives - for 1 worthy immigrant u get a lot of wage reducers or net losing propositions for the incumbent society
your surname sir - has a "u would say that" ring about it
Why not? Why not choose the best and brightest before the uneducated?
In short, his motives aren't pure. Immigration should be about building a stronger nation. We should value American values first and foremost. The Competitive Enterprise Institute is concerned about profits, not national interest and not the intent of the immigrants.
I believe we should support immigration and focus on permanent immigration. Corporations have been immigrant middle-men for too long. Their sponsorship of workers amounts to indentured servitude. The right thing to do is remove Corporations from the process and make immigration an agreement between immigrant and our nation, not immigrant and corporation.
If the Competitive Enterprise Institute said "let's change immigration so that we invite smart people to our country, and get out of the corporate sponsorship business" I would support them. But they aren't saying that. They want it all. They want to continue exploiting immigrants under the H-1b, B-1, and L-1 visas. And they also want to sell citizenship to the highest bidder - via the entrepreneur visa idea being floated around. They want to continue controlling an immigrants ability to change jobs, bargain for better wages, and use the green card as a carrot to keep them working.
Nowrasteh, email me when you have some real ideas. So far, it's just more corporate propaganda.
Nope just the 'right kind' of people are the valuable resource aka we want them but don't wanna pay and benefit them adequately and to be compliant and don't dare form a union, and markets aren't exactly 'free' oh and the 'right incentive' that's aka 'government help/bailout' entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, and innovators-sorry it's more like field workers, hotel maid staff, fast food attendents etc.
Ah, I see, so it was the immigrants all along.
Go look up the salary of an adjunct professor and see how having no limits in academia has impacted wages. You're better off getting a 4 year degree and teaching first graders than getting an advanced degree and teaching college students - in terms of pay.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to supply and demand. More people willing to do a job amounts to lower pay. If universities were taking that money they saved by hiring lower paid foreign adjunct professors and lowering tuition or improving education I may be warmer to the idea. But tuition is skyrocketing and I don't see marked improvement to education.
The motives for immigration should not be about cheap labor. We need to get out of the temporary staffing business and make immigration truly about immigration - which means a new life in a new country.
And the notion that a white collar worker is more valuable to our nation than a blue collar worker sounds like elitism to me. When it comes to immigration, I care more about your love of democracy and American values than your math and science skills.