I do political coordinating for Startup Visa. Anything with 'visa' = immigration, which is a whole other can of (political) worms. The White House/OSTP is certainly aware of Startup Visa and understands how important it is to the tech community, as they've mentioned the policy during the Facebook and Twitter town halls, as well as the President's El Paso immigration speech. However, few in the political world have made the connection between startup visa and jobs.

In their defense, I just finished up some first order analysis, based on the Startup Genome report. Startup Visa as is currently proposed in the S. 565/H.R. 1114—supported by folks like pg and Brad Feld—would create about 15,000 jobs and nearly $1B in revenue during the first two years. To contrast this with the macroeconomic situation, the US needs to create 125,000 jobs each month to keep up with population growth. Now if someone can get me an economic multiplier number, reflecting the fact that tech companies like Facebook are highly leveraged in terms of the economic impact:jobs creation ratio, that'd be a different fish on Capitol Hill...

Assumptions: cap of '10,000-X' visas, based on the number of unused visas in the EB-5 Investor Visa that would be made available as Startup Visas; no more than 4000 EB-5 visas have ever been granted in a single year to date; 5000 Startup Visas is a reasonable first-order guess

Data comes from the Startup Genome survival rates, jobs created per startup stage, and revenue ranges.

I'm looking for help for anyone interested in advancing Startup Visa on Capitol Hill, so drop me a message: http://www.quora.com/Craig-Montuori

Also, if anyone's interested, there's a call tomorrow hosted by the White House on the 'America Jobs Act': "Business Leaders Briefing Call

What: Overview of President Obama's “American Jobs Act” Who: A Senior White House Official Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT Conference Call Number: (866) 615-1890 Participant Access Code: 216408"