
Visas for entrepreneurs - newscasta
http://www.economist.com/node/21556636
======
seats
2 days ago, Startup Act 2.0 was introduced to the house floor (a).

The highlights of the act, which include many of the suggestions in this
thread-

1 - Create a new STEM visa so that U.S.-educated foreign students who graduate
with a master’s or Ph.D. in science, technology, engineering or mathematics
can receive a green card and stay in this country where their talent and ideas
can fuel growth and create American jobs.

2 - Establish an Entrepreneur’s Visa for legal immigrants so they can remain
in the United States, launch businesses and create jobs, and eliminates the
per-country caps for employment-based immigrant visas, which hinders U.S.
employers from recruiting the top-tier talent they need to grow.

3 - Make permanent the exemption of capital gains taxes on the sale of startup
stock held for at least five years, so investors can provide financial
stability at a critical juncture of firm growth.

4 - Create a targeted research and development tax credit for young startups
less than five years old and with less than $5 million in annual receipts.
This R&D credit is designed to allow startups to offset employee taxes,
freeing up resources to help these young companies expand and create jobs.

5 - Use existing federal R&D funding to better support university initiatives
designed to bring cutting-edge R&D to the marketplace more quickly, where it
can propel economic growth. Require government agencies to conduct a cost-
benefit analysis of proposed “major rules” with an economic impact of $100
million or more.

6 - Direct the U.S. Department of Commerce to assess state and local policies
that aid in the development of new businesses.

(a)
[http://polis.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=2...](http://polis.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=298355)

~~~
pyoung
I agree with most of this with the exception of number 3. While taxes can be a
large burden on any firm, new or old, if an investor is selling his/her
shares, presumably they are cashing out of their company and stuffing it in
their personal bank account. Exemption from taxes at that point just seems
more like a handout to those who are already successful rather then a real
incentive for investment. Am I missing something here?

~~~
seats
That particular provision is actually just making permanent a temporary
exemption that already exists.

The intention is to increase capital available to startups because of the
extra tax incentive for investors.

~~~
pyoung
I was aware of that. I don't fully agree with the exemption even as a
temporary measure, but I do understand that we are desperately trying to
revive our economy and can understand the rationale behind it.

------
simplekoala
The least US could do is to - Get rid of country based quotas for employment
based GC immigration, Provide instant GCs for immigrations who get advanced
degrees in STEM from top institutes in US

I know a ton of entrepreneurial Indian, Chinese immigrants with advanced
degrees (MS/PhDs) from MIT, Stanford, UW etc who are sick and tired of waiting
years for their GC (average of 5-7 years wait), so they are not tied to the
fate of the employer for their stay in US. Imagine, freeing them for these
visa shackles, so they are free to pursue their own ventures, without have to
worry about getting kicked out of this country

~~~
zugheliang
Agreed. As I personally can ratify, it takes a great deal of intellectual and
emotional investment to be tied to the fate of our employers. The gamble
impacts every aspect of your life, from having a family to buying a car or
house. I am incredibly thankful to this country for the opportunity, but I
think I've proven I am a good candidate for a Visa that provides me peace of
mind.

------
ahsanhilal
So I have gone through this problem personally and it is a HUGE pain. There
are only two specified categories of business visas in which enterpreneurs
could apply. One is E-2 Investment visa and the other is the EB-5. So as such
there is no Entrepreneurship visa is the USA. For the visas above you need to
show substantial investment in the US economy which could be anywhere between
50k to 100k for E-2, and over 500k for EB-5, depending on the business.

I got the E-2 visa based on my first company I started and by the time I
applied we already had paying customers and orders. I expedited my application
and the approval for E-2 came in exactly 15 days.

So its not undoable if you can muster up some money from outside the US.
However, if you can only raise from inside the US you are hugely
disadvantaged. The other hack to this would be to form a company and apply for
an H-1 based on the company, which is hard to get. Once you are on H-1 you can
apply for a green card after a certain time period (I think it is 5 years or
so but not sure)

~~~
dm8
Could you please elaborate on how did you expedite your application and got
your visa in 15 days (if you dont mind). I know couple of my friends who'll be
looking for visa sometime soon hence asking.

~~~
Scorponok
I went through the E-2 process a few years ago. IIRC you can pay an extra
$1000 to make your application a "high priority" one, which cuts the
guaranteed response time from something like 3 months to 30 days.

When I did it as a high-priority application, I got an initial response saying
"we need more data" within 2-3 weeks (from what I remember), then the final
approval 2-3 weeks after I submitted that info.

~~~
ahsanhilal
I actually got it on the first go which surprised even me. Though it was more
of a testament to how thorough my lawyer was.

------
tosseraccount
Why not raise wages and increase on the job training for Americans? This
sounds like a subsidy for the college industry and puts them in control of the
visas. Concentrating on and fixing things here should create more jobs and
lower unemployment should be the focus of any new legislation. Since we
already have generous immigration policies AND there's no real hindrance to
capital mobility perhaps venture financiers have no real barriers to investing
by exploring alternate markets overseas. Why not do the facebook from Africa
or South America?

~~~
steveplace
I think you're looking at this from a labor perspective, when it's more from a
capital perspective.

If (and this is a big if) an entrepreneur gets a visa and hires 1 more person,
then it's a good trade from an employment angle.

On top of that, current domestic unemployment statistics are incomplete by
just looking at the U-6 number. For programmers and other STEM fields, there
is a labor shortage. For workers unemployed from industries generated from the
credit bubble, their jobs are unlikely to come back.

And the main barrier to VC money moving to different countries is lack of
experience in the area and field.

~~~
tosseraccount
"Labor shortage" ? What evidence is there that there is a labor shortage? I'll
buy that there is a mis-match between what employers want to pay and what an
employee wants to take.

I suppose there's a prime rib-eye steak shortage. I'm willing to pay $1 for a
steak!!! But nobody wants to supply me with it. But if I raise my price to
$12, then suddenly I can find many suppliers. Is there a rib-eye steak
shortage?

So many "STEM" types work in places like Manhattan, Silicon Valley, Boston,
etc. These are high cost of living areas and careers can be very short. $80/K
a year can not buy a house. Perhaps the industry's solution is working better
with local labor. Henry Ford did it when paid his workers and "outrageous"
$5/day. The well paid workers could afford things, like the Ford cars they
were making.

Bill Gates and Tim Cook can afford it. So can Sand Hill Road. Pay the going
rate.

If American needs more "venture", invest in American Moms and Dads and they'll
do great things.

------
refurb
Anyone have any knowledge of how easy these ex-US start-up visa are to get?

It's one thing for a country to have a visa category, but it's another to
actually qualify for one.

When I read this: "New Zealand has no specific capital requirement but offers
residency to entrepreneurs whose firms are deemed to benefit the country."

I wondered how broad "benefit to the country" is interpreted.

~~~
te_chris
As a New Zealander, it probably means whose company is willing to provide the
minister with corporate box passes.

------
brandoncapecci
Be right back, moving to Chile. Knowing several people who've acquired visas,
it seems slightly less than the headache it's portrayed as in this article.
Admittedly, the US could do better but unless you have funding or partners
here already, why would you choose to build a startup in the US when they are
never going beat the lucrative options of other countries (many of whom have
lower costs of living)?

------
tokenadult
One issue to consider in this public policy issue, as in most public policy
issues, is basic economics. "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There
is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson
of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." Entrepreneurs are
a scarce resource from the point of view of countries. On the other hand,
countries in which to start a thriving business are a scarce resource from the
point of view of would-be entrepreneurs. Just HOW scarce a resource is, in
terms of how much an offer of that resource will change human behavior, is
measured by the resource's price, which is set by supply and demand.

There is a lot of demand for living and working in the United States. The
United States enjoys net immigration with respect to almost all other
countries in the world, and has throughout my lifetime. There are definitely
other countries that value entrepreneurs and that offer prosperity, personal
security, and freedom and democracy to would-be immigrants. But each time the
issue of immigration policy comes up on Hacker News--and it comes up a lot--
the dozens of comments make clear that many, many, many smart, diligent people
would be glad to settle in the United States, if only they could, and so all
the existing channels for legal immigration to the United States are well
used. Many of those channels bring in founders of new thriving businesses.

So the policy issue to consider in United States politics, for an American
voter like me who reads the interesting article kindly submitted here, or an
article from today's local press,

[http://www.minnpost.com/christian-science-
monitor/2012/06/st...](http://www.minnpost.com/christian-science-
monitor/2012/06/startup-act-20-could-it-be-immigration-breakthrough)

is how much I think the United States is missing out on entrepreneurs who
desire to immigrate to the United States soon rather than go to some other
country. Surely such people exist. But surely (undeniably) each year the
United States already enjoys large numbers of immigrants,

<http://www.census.gov/population/foreign/>

<http://travel.state.gov/visa/immigrants/immigrants_1340.html>

and many of the immigrants who arrive here start up businesses once they
arrive. Perhaps the United States is already doing enough. It would be
interesting to hear from readers here whether they have ever seriously
considered settling in Singapore, Britain, New Zealand, or Chile under the
currently offered policies in those countries.

AFTER EDIT: And I see (from net downvotes soon after posting) I'm already
swimming against the usual tide here of most HN participants supporting the
United States having an entrepreneur visa on easy terms: perhaps terms easy
enough for them and for their friends to use. That's a legitimate opinion. I'm
happy to learn from you. Please explain why you think that is a necessarily
better policy for the United States than the current United States policy.
Learning to persuade is part of political life here.

~~~
SkyMarshal
_> Perhaps the United States is already doing enough._

Long-term it's absolutely not enough. The fundamental socioeconomic feature of
21st century will be the competition between the US system and China's massive
population for global economic dominance.

The US population is ~300 million, China's is ~1.2 billion, 4x our size. For
every engineer, scientist, genius, etc in the US, there are ~4 in China. Over
the long term the US has no hope whatsoever of competing against that without
significant structural changes.

Those structural changes include fixing our educational system, fighting tooth
and nail for skilled immigrants, offering them better incentives to stay
rather than return home to fast growing developing economies to make their
fortunes, fixing the broken financial and patent/IP systems, etc.

Judge Posner sums up our shortfalls well in a recent blog post [1]. The US
system will need to be operating at an order of magnitude greater efficiency
than it currently is to have any hope of overcoming China's massive numbers
advantage. Immigration is one of the few crucial advantages the US can exploit
in that competition, but right now we're shooting ourselves in the foot so
hard there we're blowing our leg off.

1\. [http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.h...](http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.html)

~~~
EGreg
Unless, of course, there are more people with genius IQs living in china then
there are people of any kind living in the U.S. :P

just had to throw that one in there... j/k

~~~
SkyMarshal
Haha, I actually tried to find that scene on Youtube to reference in my post,
but couldn't. All of _The Social Network_ breakup scenes on Youtube start
after it. That was like, the most important part for the movie, ffs.

------
codeonfire
So what is wrong with other countries that you can't start a business there?
Can anyone explain this? is this just a green grass thing?

~~~
excuse-me
Access to VC money. The money is in California, if you are even in Vancouver
the VCs don't want to come to you.

This creates a virtuous spiral where the money is there so the tech people go
there, so you start a company there because there are people there, so the VCs
go there.

There are very few other centers so concentrated, Cambridge, Berlin, Waterloo
are 1% the size.

But eventually some VCs will take the risk of a flight to Chile or Singapore -
especially new Indian/Chinese money - and gradually the pre-eminence of
silicon valley will decrease

------
te_chris
Where does the US L visa (for setting up a US subsidiary of a foreign company)
sit with all this? I've got a friend going through the process at the moment,
it seems like the closest thing to an "entrepreneur" visa, but is that not the
intent?

------
jmspring
My biggest problem with the whole entrepreneurial Visa mess is that it gets
lumped in with other Visa categories as well. Even the definition of Startup
2.0 crosses a line for me.

I believe, if someone has the the capital (or guarantee of capital) backing
for starting a company and they want to do so in the US, the process should be
very simple (beyond requisite background checks, etc). If you want to build,
please come.

Visas for "higher education", I would willingly grant extended stay Visas for
those completing PhDs but would put a slightly higher barrier on those getting
Masters. Why? Two-fold (the second I will address below). My biggest issue is,
especially here in California (for what I know), the UC system is hurting and
embracing out of state (and out of country) applicants for the added tuition.
And, for CS related degrees a Masters really generally just a one year degree.
I would like to see more than just the one-year degree before granting an
extended visa more easily than the existing visa paths.

My second problem with granting Visas to Master's students and this applies in
general to my problem with visas for technical jobs, is the currently large
unemployed base. My problem is not with those wishing to come here and
contribute, but with the system itself. And, on some level, I am complicit in
this.

The US has a very large un/underemployed base, even within tech. Companies
argue that they can't hire enough qualified people, but the reality in a lot
of cases is either: 1) the companies aren't willing to pay for the
qualifications (the controversial path); or 2) companies aren't willing to
train to fill in a potentially qualified candidate's gaps.

There are people out there that would be decent DevOps, SysAdmins, or even
developers...but when a company posts for a position, they want the closest
fit to that position. If someone might be an Ok fit over time, but would
require investment in terms of training and time, the company will bypass them
(in most cases).

For me, there is this gaping hole that this country needs to address -- we
need to provide the ability to retool those seeking jobs to better fit current
openings. The US and it's approach to "private enterprise" sucks at this. I
know people that have gone to these fly by night "learn new skills" areas only
to end up more in debt, still un/underemployed and not contributing to society
as well as they might. Even in the case where people _are_ trying (and not
giving up).

I am probably rambling here, but I think Startup 2.0 is a step in the right
direction, but I wish the US would do more to encourage the development and
reeducation of local talent. Our current system of falling into the cracks or
mortgaging ourselves further to sketchy private "learn X" institutions is
doing us no good.

------
rdl
I don't understand why family unification/kinship is such a high priority for
US immigration policy. I can see some arguments for setting the total level of
immigration at a certain level (although, personally, I'd want large amounts
of lawful immigration, provided people are going to be a net positive for the
country and economy), but if your limiting factor is cost imposed, picking
immigrants with low or negative costs seems like a much better strategy.

------
evokegood
I don't think there is any need for any entrepreneurs visa in america. Already
hundreds of thousands of Chinese, and Indians are coming in every year.

Second, the idea of innovators from outside boosting the US economy looks
bogus to me.

Third, why can't these "foreign entrepreneurs" could do all that they want to
do in their own country first, and then do some partnerships with people in
the US, so nobody immigrates no where and both parties benefit.

------
SwaroopH
I am guessing EIR is one such initiative to speed up the solution for this
problem?

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/19/entrepreneurs-
resi...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/19/entrepreneurs-residence-
start-your-engines)

<http://www.uscis.gov/eir>

------
visa
Latest H1B/Green Card Filings by US employers along with Salary trends

Guys, see link below for latest H1B/Green Card Filings by US employers along
with Salary trends <http://www.visasquare.com>

It has the exhaustive database of 600k companies.

Try to catch the latest reports as welll which is very helpful. Help all your
friends - this is a must see info for everyone to check if your company is
paying you right and what are the latest jobs for these visa sponsoring
companies.

For example this is the city wise report for 2012, this way you can check
state,city,job

<http://www.visasquare.com/top-h1b-visa-sponsors-2012/cities>

