The last article is amazing. Who knew that we had brain-yacks coming to this our country and starting
new business' and hiring Americans to work there. These Immigrants bring ideas, innovation, and the Entrepreneurship to want to start a business. How awesome, and I did not realize that most of our big well known companies were started by immigrants. Check out the last paragraph in the last article.
Making Our Economy Stronger: The Need for High-Skilled Immigration Reform
Posted by on July 28, 2011 at 02:09 PM EDT
It is one of the great American stories, repeated countless times over decades. An immigrant to the US, sitting in a lab or a company or even at home, working to start a company that ends up becoming a great American success story.
Some of our greatest companies began exactly this way. And immigrants today have great ideas that can change the world. The question is whether they will develop them in the United States or somewhere else. Our immigration system should be designed to encourage talented people to study in the United States and start companies here. But today, foreign students studying science and engineering at America’s top universities are actually discouraged from using the skills they learn to create American jobs and make our economy more competitive. The end result is that we end up training innovators and entrepreneurs for other countries. That makes no sense. Instead of showing these future entrepreneurs and scientists the door, we should be stapling a green card to their diplomas and providing Startup Visas to those with the best ideas.
Earlier this week, Senator Schumer hosted a Senate Subcommittee hearing on the “Economic Imperative for Enacting Immigration Reform”. A consistent theme among the hearing panelists, which included leaders from Microsoft and Nasdaq, was that reforming our high skill immigration policy is critical to creating American jobs and spurring economic growth.
In a global marketplace, it is an economic imperative to train, attract, and keep talented people here. When immigrants start companies and file patents they create American jobs and ensure that the industries of the 21stcentury take root here in the United States.
Immigrant entrepreneurs started 25% of engineering and technology companies between 1995 and 2005, including some of the economy’s biggest names. And immigrants are inventors. According to a Duke University study, the share of U.S. patent applications filed by immigrants rose from 7.3% to 24.2% from 1998 to 2006. Nearly a quarter of our scientists and almost half of our engineers are immigrants.
America simply cannot afford to forgo the contributions of the world’s best and the brightest to our economy. To do so would not only be contrary to our values, but also hamper our economic competitiveness. To win the future, we must ensure that highly-skilled immigrants who want to start a business or work in research laboratories do so here, creating American jobs and generating value for our economy. There is bipartisan consensus to enact comprehensive immigration reform; in an op-ed earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who served under President George W. Bush, wrote, “If we don't want to find ourselves playing catch-up in the global competition for the cutting-edge, high-growth industries of tomorrow, we need to do something now.” For generations, the world’s most talented and ambitious entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers have set their sights on our shores to study, launch start-ups, and create jobs. Let’s keep it that way and allow these high skilled immigrants to pursue the American Dream and make our economy stronger.
Austan Goolsbee is Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers
Making It Easier for Immigrants to Start Companies in the United States
Posted by on August 2, 2011 at 1:14 PM EDT
The United States has a long, rich history of welcoming innovative entrepreneurs and skilled workers into our country. These men and women fuel our nation’s economy by creating jobs, and promoting new technologies and ideas. Today, I joined Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and outlined a series of new policy, operational, and outreach efforts that will help fuel the nation’s economy and stimulate investment by making it easier for high-skill immigrants to start and grow companies and create jobs here in the United States.
Encouraging the kinds of streamlining measures USCIS is taking today has been one key focus of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness because they help ensure that America can continue to out-innovate and out-compete the world in a global economy.
As part of the Administration’s comprehensive effort to attract and retain high-skill entrepreneurs, USCIS announced today that it will:
- Clarify that immigrant entrepreneurs may obtain an employment-based second preference (EB-2) immigrant visa if they satisfy the existing requirements, and also may qualify for a National Interested Waiver under the EB-2 immigrant visa category if they can demonstrate that their business endeavors will be in the interest of the United States;
- Expand the Premium Processing Service to immigrant petitions for multinational executives and managers;
- Clarify when a sole employee-entrepreneur can establish a valid employer-employee relationship for the purposes of qualifying for an H-1B non-immigrant visa;
- Implement fundamental enhancements to streamline the EB-5 process based directly on stakeholder feedback;
- Launch new engagement opportunities to seek input and feedback on how to address the unique circumstances of entrepreneurs, new businesses and startup companies.
Today, I am also launching Conversations with the Director, a new series of small group meetings I will hold to discuss immigration issues important to communities around the country. The first meeting will focus on economic development and the EB-5 investor program.
For more information on USCIS and its programs, please visit www.uscis.gov or follow us on Twitter (@uscis), YouTube (/uscis) and the USCIS blog The Beacon. To read the Department of Homeland Security press release, click here.
Startup Stories: Coming to America
Posted by on August 03, 2011 at 12:48 PM EDT
To celebrate the first six months of the White House-led Startup America initiative, this week we are highlighting the stories of real entrepreneurs who are creating jobs across the country. Startup America aims to create the right policy environment for entrepreneurs to flourish. For example, the Department of Homeland Security has clarified the eligibility of immigrant entrepreneurs for existing visa categories, and has expanded the number of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates who can extend their work training in the U.S.
I came to the United States in 1992 at the age of 17 to attend college in Pittsburgh. Today, I am proud to be a naturalized U.S. citizen. I have helped found four companies, three of which have been successfully acquired, and one is poised to change an entire industry. As an investor, I have helped fund 15 companies. Collectively the companies I have been involved with have created well over 400 jobs – all here in the United States.
Yesterday, I attended the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness meeting here in Silicon Valley with Steve Case, Sheryl Sandberg, John Doerr and Reed Hastings, and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra. I was very pleased to hear Aneesh announce that the Obama Administration has worked to clarify the existing immigration laws when it comes to immigrant founders. This is a huge step in the right direction, and I am so pleased to see that the Administration has not only listened to and acted upon feedback from entrepreneurs like me to help make our country’s immigration system more friendly towards immigrant founders.
My American story began at Carnegie Mellon University, where I studied electrical and computer engineering as an undergrad and software engineering in graduate school. I decided that I didn’t want to just go work at some big company – so I started my own in 1996, at the age of 21, while I was still a student. For the first few months I took advantage of an outstanding program called Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows a foreign student to stay and work in the U.S. for (at the time) 12 months after graduating. (The Obama Administration has expanded the number of graduates who can stay for an extra 17 months, for a total of 29 months.)
I was determined to stay and work here in the United States. My first company, SneakerLabs, grew to about 20 employees -- every single one of them, except me, was a U.S. citizen. The company was acquired in March 2000 in a transaction valued at over $100 million. I was still on an H-1B worker visa at my old company, which made it difficult for me to found and start my next company. In fact, it was easier for me to do that as a student (because of the OPT program) than it was as an experienced worker.
In 2001 I applied for and received a green card under the category of EB-1 – “Alien of Extraordinary Ability.” While I am proud of my journey and especially proud of being branded an extraordinary alien (!), I can also see that there were several points along the journey where I almost failed – not because of lack of ability or effort, but because of a system that presented challenges for an immigrant entrepreneur to stay in the United States. That’s why this week's announcements are so encouraging – the Obama Administration is making efforts to realize the full potential of our existing immigration laws to attract the best and brightest from around the world.
Innovation know no bounds. What has worked for the United States for so long is that the smartest people from all over the world gravitate towards this country. Some, like me, come to the United States to receive higher education and advanced degrees. I strongly believe that the best thing the United States can do to attract and retain the smartest people from all over the world is to encourage these people to start their companies right here.
My story is just one little anecdote in the journey of immigrant founders who have been the driving force behind companies like Intel (Andy Grove, Hungary), Sun Microsystems (Andy Bechtolscheim, Germany; Vinod Khosla, India), eBay (Pierre Omidyar, France), Yahoo (Jerry Yang, Taiwan), Google (Sergey Brin, Russia) and so many more. Entrepreneurship is the little engine that can and does create jobs and we should welcome immigrant founders to our country.
Manu Kumar is a serial entrepreneur, the founder and “Chief Firestarter” at K9 Ventures, and a co-founder of StartupVisa.com
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