By: Alexander Goldman
February 28, 2013
A snarky venture capitalist once told me that he couldn?t give money to every ?Tom, Dick, and Raj? who came into his office with a business plan. The joke highlights the truth that startups depend upon entrepreneurial immigrants.[1]
At the event, ?Immigration Policy & Entrepreneurship: Challenges and Pathways for Startups,? held in Geraldo?s on Wednesday, February 14, the Legal Hackers Group, founded by recent graduates of Brooklyn Law School, gathered experts to discuss the problem. The event was hosted by BLS professor Jonathan Askin.
?Immigrants are 12 percent of the population, 16 percent of the workforce, and founders of 28 percent of new companies,? said Jeremy Robbins, director of the Partnership for a New American Economy at the Office of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. ?The entrepreneurs? H-1B visa opened in April of this year and was exhausted by June, and the wives of those on H-1B visas cannot work.?
?Chile will give a CEO $40,000 to start a new company,? said Robbins. ?Canada advertises that you can wait eight months to get into Canada, or nine years to get into the U.S.?
Those who have founded companies that failed should be allowed to stay, argued Owen Davis, Director of NYC Seed, a venture capital firm. ?Startups teach unwritten rules, and a serial entrepreneur learns even through failure. A person who failed is valuable ? more valuable than a first time entrepreneur. So kicking that person out of this country is really dumb.?
The stereotype of the entrepreneurial immigrant facing visa trouble is of someone who is non-white. The event included the account of? a businessman with a Canadian passport who could not get past the border to make a business presentation in New York City. Perhaps it is a good sign that the inflexible rules of immigration fall as harshly on immigrants from Canada as any other country.
Offshore
The event also heard from Blueseed, a company that wants to place a ship 12 nautical miles offshore from San Francisco in order to host startups in Silicon Valley while avoiding the red tape of immigration.
It just might work. The offshore nation of Sealand, located on an abandoned fort in the ocean off of England, recently lost its founder and prince. The principality, which is less than 6,000 square feet in size, makes money by selling titles and hosting internet servers.
A Failure to Educate
One attendee angrily asked why we should continue to import the talent we fail to create through a broken educational system.
Michael J. Wildes, managing partner of Wildes and Weinberg, P.C., said that we should do both. He said that for every person who comes to the United States; earns a degree in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM); and chooses to stay and found a business will create several STEM jobs. ?The long term solution is to produce more STEM graduates here, but the short term solution is immigration reform.?
Nicholas Allard, Dean of Brooklyn Law School, said that the school was the perfect location of the event because Brooklyn has historically hosted so many immigrants and today is home to so many startups.
Source: http://blsadvocate.org/2013/02/legal-hackers-tackle-startup-immigration-woes/
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