While President Obama's State of the Union address did not focus on immigration, his few statements on that issue sent out conflicting signals. The president pushed for a comprehensive immigration reform plan that includes letting foreign businessmen and entrepreneurs immigrate to the U.S.
It's a great idea, but it's hard to take Obama's commitment to it seriously, since in the same speech he touted his increased enforcement policies -- record deportations up by over 400 percent since 1996, workplace raids, stricter work permit rules, and the deputizing of thousands of local police departments as immigration agents.
If the president is serious about immigration reform, he should be looking for ways to end the failed policies of the past, rather than double up on their increasingly draconian enforcement. And it is especially crucial he do so now. If the president truly wants more business growth and opportunities for Americans, he needs to turn his words into action. Business start-ups have decreased 23 percent over the last five years. We could quickly turn that around by removing immigration barriers for entrepreneurs.
To illustrate what is at stake, consider one famous example. Had the family of Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, not immigrated to America from the Soviet Union as refugees when he was a child, it is unlikely he would have been able to come to U.S. at all, especially as an entrepreneur. The success of Google -- which has a market capitalization of $184 billion and employs over 32,000 people worldwide -- might never have been had Brin tried to come to America as an adult.
There is only one way Brin could have entered the U.S. as an entrepreneur: the EB-5 immigrant investor visa. (Another route, the E-2 investor visa, is not available to Russian nationals.) The EB-5 program makes 10,000 visas available annually to immigrant investors who invest $1 million in a commercial enterprise ($500,000 in a high-unemployment area) and directly creates at least 10 new jobs, or makes a massive new investment in an existing business.
In reality, Brin and Page solicited investments and cash while graduate students at Stanford. Eventually, they convinced Andy Bechtolsheim, a Jewish German immigrant and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to invest $100,000 in their venture -- nowhere near enough to satisfy the EB-5's capital requirement.
Even if Brin, by some miracle, had been able to develop a workable search engine during the post-Soviet disorder, partner with a Russian version of Larry Page, and find enough investors in a cash-starved former Communist country, he still would not have qualified for the EB-5 investor visa.
The other ways that Brin could have immigrated legally -- though not initially as an entrepreneur -- would be as a priority, professional, skilled, or special immigrant on an employment-based green card, of which only 140,000 are issued annually. However, it is expensive for firms to sponsor immigrants with legal and government fees in the thousands of dollars, so this is hardly an ideal option.
Another way would be through the H-1B visa program, a temporary skilled worker program that allows the worker to apply for an employment-based green card while working in the U.S. But even if Brin had been able to get in on an employment-based green card or an H-1B visa, he would have had to work as an employee for several years before getting the chance to start Google.
Brin is a creative and ambitious innovator, so he may have entered on one of these other visas and created Google, but the odds are low. If our immigration laws have prevented the creation of even one other Google, they are even worse than most economists think. But it's not just potential large businesses that aren't created because immigration laws make life difficult for entrepreneurs. Many potential small businesses are also nipped in the bud.
New firms and startups are the source of most of America's productivity growth. They innovate, find market niches, and divide production into new and profitable combinations. Not all grow to be as large or innovative as Google, but they all make their own significant contributions to our economy. All the government needs to do is let them.
Federal immigration bureaucrats don't have a crystal ball that can tell them who will make a successful entrepreneur. Yet our laws pretend they can do so. Soviet central planners, whom Brin's family sought to escape, tried to predict demand for goods and services with catastrophic consequences. American immigration officials shouldn't harbor the same conceit. It's time to end this charade.
People become entrepreneurs when they choose to take that risk and strike out on their own. As to who might do so and when we can only guess. But three things don't require guessing: 1. Immigrants across the skills spectrum are very entrepreneurial; 2. American capitalism and native-born entrepreneurs want to work with immigrants to create wealth; and, 3. Our immigration laws need to get out of their way.
Follow Alex Nowrasteh on Twitter: www.twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh
Our goal should be a ever smaller pay check to a ever poorer workforce. Thank goodness we are allowing well skilled professionals to flood our country while increasing the student debt of the domestic population. The last thing we need are people like nurses thinking they can live in the middle class...and while we're at it, let's get rid of the middle class too.
And face it. No American would ever have created a Google. If Brin had died, OMG! Only immigrants can be innovative.
If Mr. Nowrasteh really believes Americans fall short as entrepreneurs, then perhaps he would support programs for our recent immigrants to make sure they don't fall into that rat-hole with the existing population. If his premise is correct, then immigrants will lose their competitive edge as they assimilate. Quelle horreur!
nd another 4 times indirectly due to h1-B visa recipients , This is corporate welfare for the banks and hi-tech companies that lobby ( bribe ) politicians for for the cheaper labor
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Yes, in which case someone else would have launched the dominant search engine. It's not as if Brin invented the search engine. And we had a dominant search engine before Google, you know, so the idea that there wouldn't be a dominant search engine had Brin not immigrated to the US is false.
One could argue that Brin could have emmigrated to another country instead and founded the dominant engine there, but that's unlikely. There's a lot more to the US than its immigration policies. For all that righwingers are never satisfied, most of the rest of the world doesn't offer the fertile business environment the US does. Besides, most other countries have much, much stricter immigration laws than we do.
But suppose we had lost Google. It's time to examine just how much companies like Google benefit the economy. In 2010, Google and McDonald's had about the same revenue. However, McDonald's employed 400,000 people while Google employed only about 20,000.You would need 40 Googles today to employ a million people, and we have 15 million unemployed.
We'd need 200 companies the size of Google just to bring our unemployment down to 5%. That's not going to happen no matter how many immigrants we let in.
When did America develop this inferiority complex???
According to the National Science Foundation, more than 10 million native born American technologists, engineers and scientists, work in in non-tech jobs (taxi drivers, Walmart, etc.).
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/immigration-and-guest-worker-policies-undermining-us-tech-workers-finds-new-report-from-fair-133835948.html
This columnist (and so many others) sounds like he's got an inferiority complex though. He writes as though Americans can't do these things. We both know that they can.
Bashing Americans is a crappy way to justify this agenda. And his implication that Americans can't do tech is just that: bashing Americans.
Yet American columnists somehow do. How is it that they seem to think that only immigrants are capable of starting businesses? What about Americans who decide not to start a business because there are already several in that field? Columnists never seem to believe that Americans are capable of doing these things. Americans are displaced from these fields of work and business by immigrants.
How many Googles haven't been started due to excessive immigration? How many Americans have left or never entered STEM fields of work due to excessive competition for jobs caused by too high immigration levels?
And concerning the constant claims of employers that US workers lack qualifications, just consider that H-1B, L-1, J-1, OPT workers, etc. come overwhelmingly from the low wage countries (forget well educated but higher wage Japan or Western Europe). Isn't it amazing that these great workers and entrepreneurs can only be found in the low wage countries? Anyone think THAT''s a coincidence?
We should all be soooo skeptical of claims of labor shortage these days!!!
Despite the jobless epidemic, U.S. companies are tripping over themselves to fill high paying job openings with workers from overseas. Companies, lead by Microsoft and IBM, have already maxed out their allotment of 65,000 H-1B visas.
But there are more than 65,000 AMERICAN jobs at stake. The USCIS also received "more than 20,000 H-1B petitions filed on behalf of persons exempt from the cap under the ‘advanced degree’ exemption," it said. In addition, petitions for workers who already have their visas are not counted toward the cap.
U.S. workers have complained that the program allows companies to ignore U.S. workers and import employees willing to work for lower wages.
Critics of the program have also complained that H-1B workers have diminished rights and protections, too. They have charged that such workers cannot leave their employers, for instance. Workers must petition the USCIS to extend their visa, change employers, accept a second back-to-back H-1B position and so on.
As with previous years, Microsoft imports the most overseas talent, followed by IBM and Indian outsourcer Infosys Systems. The top 25 users of H1-B visas come largely from the high tech sector.
http://www.businessinsider.com/despite-high-unemployment-us-companies-have-already-maxed-out-2012-foreign-worker-visas-2011-12#comment-4ee03088eab8ea474800000f
What is the result of turning back the clock on Microsoft by one decade? Progress.
But the story of Molina is a bit different than the usual outsourcing horror stories we hear all too often. Workers at Molina are fighting back with a lawsuit alleging that the company and its employment contractor have discriminated again them because they are not from India and fired them after creating a hostile work environment by holding meetings in Hindi with no translators present, leaving English speakers bewildered and isolated. Also according to the complaint, they required U.S. workers to take work home on U.S. holidays but did not ask Indian workers to do the same on Indian holidays.