As to its relevance, well the UN has other ideas. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=23794
I wanted to go a bit further back without referencing the Big Bang.
There is already a visa for investors creating jobs so that is covered.
This visa (E-2 treaty investor visa) has deficiencies. Firstly, although there is no official minimum investment amount, in practice, as a founder you need to invest at least $50 to $100 thousand to have non-negligible chances of obtaining this visa. This excludes virtually all founders in this community who receive YC funding! Secondly, it requires the investor to own 50%+ of the company, hence it excludes most startups where the equity is roughly evenly distributed between 3 cofounders or more. Thirdly, only citizens of treaty countries can apply to this visa. This excludes about 110 countries in the world (only 80 countries on the list [1]).
A solution like this would have kept a good chunk of all the famous immigrant entrepreneurs from ever coming to the US.
Compute how many slots are available, based on national concerns (mostly, how many people can you easily integrate and naturalize per year). Then, auction off the slots to the highest bidder, and have a short-track naturalization process for the winners.
(I am getting paid at or above the average salary for my profession, by the way. My company hired me because they literally could not find any qualified Americans for the position, either local or willing to move to the area.)
A problem with startup visas is that nobody knows what a viable startup is, and countries have a strong incentive not to offer long-term residency to people who can't support themselves. So what we have to go on instead are proposals like "we'll allow you in if you're sponsored by a qualified venture capitalist", which creates it own set of perverse incentives.
Probably the best way to deal with "startup visa" is to instead have a small-business visa. Small-business already has an understood (to the government) meaning, and there's already a lot of examples of slightly different rules for them.
Wealth creation is the key metric. While harder to measure, it's what actually moves society forward.
This is kind of obviously wrong. Just substitute "entertainment" for the ditch digging and it should become apparent why. Those people might have made their money in a silly way, but much of it will be spent, and that is important.
http://cis.org/immigration-and-the-american-worker-review-ac...
Here is a data point: 40 Percent of Fortune 500 Companies Founded by Immigrants or Their Children: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2011/06/19/40-per... And because immigrants represent a minority of the people in america (12.6% as of 2007 [1]; and when adding their children this is likely still less than 40%), we can deduct they create more businesses per capita than americans.
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=aaimTNHDzZYC&pg=PA32...
The Fortune 500 stat smells pretty slippery and cherry picked. I mean, one co-founder had one parent born overseas and the company is counted as immigrant founded? This is meaningful? The vast majority of major companies were probably also founded by people who grew up in major urban centers. Immigrants are disproportionately likely to live in major cities. What happens when you control for that? I cast aspersions.
The link I provided is actually fairly rigorous in describing the effect of immigration as it is currently practiced in the USA: It drives down the wages of low earners and increases profits to the economic elite. It's probably a wash for the bulk of the middle class when measured in purely financial terms, but that ignores various psychic and ecological impacts. Did you know that current immigration rates projected out result in a USA population of over 600 million by the end of the century? Is it not obviously insane and ecologically criminal to allow that level of over population?
Sources of research are always important. Like most things, it is not a simple issue that you can put on a bumper sticker.
I've written about this before, and I like to impress upon you yet again that the majority of H-1Bs are taken by outsourcing / consulting companies that you might not have heard of, like WiPro, InfoSys, Satyam, Tata, Deloitte, Patni, which contribute the least to innovation, in my humble opinion.
Second in line is Microsoft, Google, et al. and the smallest group by far are startups and small businesses, which innovate the most and create the most jobs for the US.
Why not make work visas easier to get for small companies but limit visas per company? That'll make sure companies pick correctly and only people they need. Or maybe make it much more expensive. There is currently an additional (around 2k/appl iirc) cost for having too many H-1Bs, but it's not enough. The visa system heavily favours larger companies, because it was created and lobbied by them.
More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5515519
....
Besides, if you're worried about foreigners driving salaries down, you should quit targeting the H-1B which has a legitimate prevailing wage requirement (and we can argue for days whether the DOL does a good job of deciding what prevailing is, and I'll say it does, but that's a different issue).
The L-1 visa for employees of multinationals has almost as many people entering the country per year, but has NO prevailing wage requirements. Yup, I can bring in a person from another country and pay them federal minimum wage to be an engineer.
...
My opinion on calls to end the H-1B used to be pretty negative but maybe we do need a startup visa. My problem with the startup visa is that it's pushed by VCs and favours that model heavily. Want to bootstrap? Want to raise angel investment for a year or two? Good luck.
In any case, the US has a labour force of 150 million. We're talking about 85k a year.
Could we agree that letting small / medium businesses hire a reasonable number of H-1Bs easily would not demolish the the US economy or significantly? Let the cap be for the large ones.
Totally agreed on the cap for large companies and not small ones. There is a lot of precedent for small companies having different rules, and this is one where being small is a huge disadvantage.
In my case, it's because I might hire one H-1B in a year and can't take the risk that I will lose them to a lottery. A company hiring 100 can risk losing a % of that.
We need visas for entrepreneurs, we don't need more H-1b's
example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
I've been working for over 4 years. As things stand, I have to wait for another ~5 years before I get my green card and start adding jobs to the economy. And that's assuming the US government does not delay it by making me jump through various hoops like they did with my H1B application.
