The Huffington Post published an op-ed on the Startup Visa movement that
I’ve been working on for some time. I’ve quoted from the article
extensively below, but I hope you’ll take a moment and read the whole
thing. I believe we have a unique opportunity to pass the Startup
Visa Act this year – if we continue to stay focused on delivering the
message to lawmakers that this is something their constituents want. So,
as a reminder, if this is something you support, please get involved.
You can literally make a difference with as little as a tweet, by using
2gov at http://startupvisa.2gov.org/.
Once you’ve done that, let us know if you want to do more. You can find
a list of ways to get involved at StartupVisa.com. Thanks!
America’s future
prosperity depends on our ability to maintain this lead. But today, it
is getting harder and harder to maintain. A quick glance is the
rear-view mirror reveals that other countries are catching up and at an
alarming rate. Part of this is due to their determination to overtake
us, but part is due to structural changes in the nature of
entrepreneurship.
Startups are the lifeblood of our economy. In the past two decades,
they have accounted for nearly all the net job growth in our country.
Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now
household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. But many more are true
American success stories, out of the limelight, quietly creating jobs
and securing our future.
Take the example of Indiana’s Passageways. Paroon Chadha came to the US
for his graduate education, and was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug
immediately after school. He started Passageways Inc. immediately upon
graduating, and has spent the last 8 years struggling to work around
visa restrictions. Luckily for the rest of us, he was able to find his
path to a green card, and now employs 24 Americans in West Lafayette,
Indiana. For every success story like Paroon’s, there are dozens —
hundreds — of similar cases that end in failure.
Like other industries — from publishing to automobiles —
entrepreneurship is in the process of being disrupted by globalization.
The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to
markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone
with an Internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of
the digital means of production.
[…]
If the next Facebook, Google, or Amazon begins in another country, the
economic growth that it sparks will benefit us, too. But the jobs will
be created over there.
The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious
resource — the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends.
Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American
job creation. For example, over 25% of the technology companies founded
between 1995-2005 had a key immigrant founder. These companies
produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed
450,000 workers that year. Similarly, 24% of all the patents filed in
the US in 2006 had a foreign resident as inventor or co-inventor.
If we allow other countries to welcome these immigrants, support them
and nurture them, we will lose out in this race. We will not lose on
their products — after all, most of them are global. We will not
necessarily harm investors, either: as capital is increasingly global,
they will be able to invest wherever good ideas are born. The cost will
be felt in jobs — thousands of new jobs that could have been created
here, but weren’t.
Read the rest of The
New Startup Arms Race at Huffington Post. Special thanks to
everyone who’s helped advance this movement, especially Brad Feld,
Shervin Pishevar, Dave McClure, Dave Binetti and Abheek Anand. And an
extra special thanks to the volunteer copyeditors who reached out via
twitter to help improve this piece.
(image source: farm1.static)
