USA Green Card Immigration Blog

U.S. to Assist Immigrant Job Creators – WSJ.com.

In its quest to spur job growth and jump-start the economy, Washington is reaching out to foreign entrepreneurs.

Alejandro Mayorkas, chief of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday will unveil several initiatives designed to attract and retain foreign entrepreneurs, particularly in the high-tech sector, who wish to launch start-up companies in the U.S.

Among the initiatives is a plan to make it easier for some foreigners to qualify for legal permanent residence, or green cards, if they can demonstrate their work will be in the U.S. national interest. The changes will also include a way for entrepreneurs to obtain work visas without a job offer from an established company.

Mr. Mayorkas also plans to announce that his agency will be training its examiners on how visa-eligibility requirements apply to entrepreneurs.

“In this economy, it certainly is in the interest of this nation to welcome foreign talent,” Mr. Mayorkas said in an interview.

The changes come as increasing numbers of software entrepreneurs have been taking their start-ups to other countries, often after completing advanced degrees in the U.S., because of the difficulty in securing temporary work visas and permanent residency here.

Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the University at California, Berkeley, who studies immigrant entrepreneurs, estimates the new measures could yield “tens of thousands of start-ups and hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

The measures won’t require congressional approval because they don’t constitute changes in current immigration law. Instead, clarifications will be issued for existing visa categories with the objective of enabling more entrepreneurs to gain entry into the U.S. and of bringing more speed and efficiency to the visa-application process.

“The Obama administration is getting the immigration system engaged in creating jobs,” said Steve Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell University Law School. “They are trying to facilitate the ability of entrepreneurs to get temporary work visas and green cards when the economy is in the doldrums.”

Generally, immigrant entrepreneurs must have a specific job offer to qualify for an employment-based immigrant visa or green card, such as in the category for individuals with exceptional ability in the arts, sciences and business.

As part of the new initiatives, foreign entrepreneurs will be eligible for a so-called EB-2 immigrant visa without a specific job offer, as long as they demonstrate that their business endeavors will be in the U.S. national interest.

The government is also seeking to bolster use by foreign entrepreneurs of H-1Bs, which are temporary work visas for foreign workers in a specialty occupation.

The H-1B program has been a mainstay of software companies and other businesses that seek foreign nationals to fill certain jobs, and an employer-employee relationship has generally been a prerequisite for qualifying.

As part of the new measures, a sole entrepreneur can qualify for an H-1B if the individual’s employment is decided by a corporate board or shareholders of the start-up company.

Mr. Mayorkas will also unveil enhancements to the EB-5 investor program, which enables foreign investors and their families to qualify for green cards if they invest at least $500,000 in a U.S. project that generates at least 10 jobs.

His agency is also seeking to speed up the approval process by hiring additional adjudicators to evaluate applications and enabling petitioners to make their case before an expert panel should their application require further evidence or be denied.

The moves come as demand for H-1B visas has fallen. As of July 22, USCIS had received approximately 21,600 H-1B petitions out of 65,000 available for the 2012 fiscal year. The agency had received approximately 26,000 such applications for the same period last year.

Several factors are at play, including higher fees for the visas and increasingly better opportunities in countries such as India that entice their skilled workers to return home rather than stay in the U.S.

While completing his Master’s degree in computer science at the University of Southern California in 2008, Anuj Agarwal launched a company called Nachofoto.com, a start-up that makes a product used by search engines and digital-media companies. Unable to get a U.S. visa for himself and expecting his workers would have the same trouble, Mr. Agarwal moved the company to India.

“After realizing we had visa barriers to the U.S., we opened another company here,” Mr. Agarwal said in an interview from Mumbai.

Norberto Guimaraes of Portugal said he had to leave the U.S. in May 2010 after his student visa expired and his H-1B petition was denied because he lacked an employer to sponsor him, even though he was the founder and chief executive of his start-up.

“I had to sell the start-up that I had created while doing my M.B.A. at U.C. Berkeley together with another M.B.A. colleague,” he said.

Mr. Guimaraes was able to return to the U.S. this year, sponsored for a work visa by another company.

Letters to the Editor: Smart Immigrants Yes, but H1-Bs Are No Panacea – WSJ.com.

Paul Kedrosky and Brad Feld assert that we should make it easy for immigrants to move here in order to create start-ups by stapling green cards to the degrees of foreign students and easing H1-B restrictions (“Start-up Visas Can Jump-Start the Economy,” Dec. 2). In support of their argument that immigrants are entrepreneurial, they list several start-ups founded by immigrants, including Google, Pfizer, Intel, Yahoo, DuPont, eBay, and Procter & Gamble. However, a closer look at these examples proves very enlightening. Three of these immigrant-founded start-ups were created in the 19th century. Andy Grove of Intel, a Hungarian immigrant, was not the founder of Intel. That honor goes to two Americans, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. Mr. Grove originally joined the company as an employee. Of the remaining companies, all of their founders immigrated to the U.S. with their families as young children. Google’s co-founder (with an American) Sergey Brin left Moscow with his family at age 6; Yahoo co-founder (with an American) Jerry Yang left Taiwan at age 8; eBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, emigrated from France at age 6.

Note that none of these immigrants was on an H1-B or even a student visa. Essentially, the “immigrant” entrepreneurs whom the authors so admire were raised as Americans and were co-founders of businesses with Americans.

Mara Alexander

Alexandria, Va.

Messrs. Kedrosky and Feld’s appeal to allow would-be immigrant entrepreneurs and technical grads to enrich our economy with fast-track visas is spot on. I would add that we should also allow investors, holders of advanced degrees, and in-demand skilled professionals, regardless of their country of origin, to be fast-tracked also. They are most likely to enrich our country. We allow special consideration for compassionate reasons such as family reunification and amnesty from abusive regimes, even though they may be net revenue drains on our economy via social services, schools and prisons. Why not allow in those immigrants w

ho will create jobs through investment, innovation and valuable education or technical skills which they’ve acquired by becoming successful and who want to take a chance on us?

Debra Janssen-Martinez

Los Gatos, Calif.

Paul Kedrosky and Brad Feld: Start-up Visas Can Jump-Start the Economy – WSJ.com.

While fast-growing companies have long been the main source of new jobs and innovation, this country makes it outrageously difficult for immigrants to launch new companies here. This doesn’t make any sense. After all, Google, Pfizer, Intel, Yahoo, DuPont, eBay and Procter & Gamble are all former start-ups founded by immigrants. Where would this country be today without their world-changing innovations?

Immigrants have not only founded big, well-known companies. Foreign-born residents made up just 12.5% of the U.S. population in 2008. But nearly 40% of technology company founders and 52% of founders of companies in Silicon Valley.

Yet we don’t seem to care. We send recent, foreign-born university science and engineering graduates back to their own countries after their student visas expire—unless these creative sorts are willing to spend some of the most entrepreneurial years of their lives working in a big company under an H-1B visa after they finish their studies.

For those who studied elsewhere, but who nonetheless want to bring their job-creating ideas here, American policies treat them—the job-creating, trouble-making innovators that they are—as a cross between deadbeats and queue-jumpers. Why can’t they wait in line like everyone else to get a visa in five years or so? What’s their hurry?

Their hurry is Joseph Schumpeter’s hurry: They want to hustle out and disrupt markets when the opportunity arises.

In the 21st century those opportunities don’t wait for our interminable, employment-based visa programs. As a result rather than saying “Come and create jobs here” we, in effect, tell them to shove off. Come back when you have a few million in sales— at which point they will be rooted elsewhere and creating jobs somewhere else.

That needs to end now. Immigrants who come here to create companies create jobs. We need the jobs.

One good idea to make this process easier is to create a new visa for entrepreneurs, something that is increasingly being called by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and angel investors a “start-up visa.” It might work like this: If immigrant entrepreneurs want to start a company in the U.S. and are able to raise a moderate amount of money (perhaps as little as $125,000) from an accredited U.S.-based venture capital firm or qualified U.S.-based angel investors, we should let them start a company here. It could be a couple of founders with an idea—that’s it. We would give visas to the founders and welcome them in to our country.

Would it work every time? Of course not. It would fail more often than not. Start-ups often fail.

But having failed, the immigrant entrepreneurs could try again, and again. And as long as they are trying, raising money, creating jobs, and making sales, we would let them stay here. Founders of new companies are precious for a vibrant economy, and we should welcome them. Indeed, the country would be better served to find more of them.

Some will say a start-up visa program will be abused. They will say that it will become a way to end-run immigration rules, to jump the queue if you have money.

There are at least two answers to these objections. First, to get such a visa you would have to raise money from real investors. Second, Canada and other countries already allow entrepreneurs to start a company in their country. Shouldn’t the U.S. stop worrying so much about keeping these people out, and start worrying about bringing them in?

We also think science and engineering graduates should get visas stapled to their diplomas. You complete your higher education here, you get to stay so that you can get out and create jobs, innovate, and grow the economy. Uncle Sam wants you, if you’re a prospective entrepreneur.

The U.S. remains one of the most attractive countries for entrepreneurs. It has a culture of risk taking, capital formation, and an economic dynamism that is the envy of the world. This gives us a competitive edge that we should not let slip through our fingers.