May 29, 2009
OPEN Forum Message
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One thing we try to do is show how entrepreneurship fosters innovation and will actually help lift the United States out of the current troubles in which it finds itself mired and regain its spot atop the global economy. But damned if U.S. immigration laws aren't making that more difficult, as a New York Times piece on how strict U.S. immigration laws affect the tech industry showed.
Without the ingenuity and enterprise of numerous foreign-born engineers and thinkers, the tech industry as we know it simply wouldn't exist; we Americans are all incredibly better off for the fact that our country exerts a magnetism, a pull no other does and makes some of the most brilliant and talented people in the world want to live here, innovate here, do business here, and pay taxes here.
But onerous immigration and visa requirements--the type that forces Google (whose co-founder Sergey Brin was born in Russia, by the way), for example, to spend $4.5 million each year on visa administration--are limiting the extent to which the U.S. can take advantage of its magnetism and pull. The consequences of these regulations should be obvious: given how the homelands of many foreign-born tech superstars--China, India, Russia, South Korea, etc.--have developed over the past years and decades, now they are increasingly likely to stay at home and innovate in and for their own countries. And the U.S., which should be laying out the red carpet for them, is giving them one more reason to do just that.
It's insanity. And it's also, indelibly, a small-business and entrepreneurship issue (far more than it is merely a tech issue--the immigration restrictions affect life-sciences, communications, the arts and fashion, and indeed any other industry that would stand to benefit from the brilliance of foreign nationals). We're going to do our part to frame this as such. But we hope that prominent voices in the small-business community, whether they are lobbies or legislators or the head of the Small Business Administration, will speak up for a more open immigration and visa policy where idea-jobs are concerned. The future of small-business and entrepreneurship is at stake.
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