I wrote a post a couple of months ago about the problems that current immigration policy is creating for high tech businesses in their hiring. However, our immigration policy impacts more that just the hiring of high tech workers. It is also having an impact on the creation of businesses in our entrepreneurial economy.
From TechJournal South:
More than a quarter of technology and engineering firms started in the United States over the 1995-2005 decade had a least one key foreign born founder. But those who grow frustrated faced with delays in obtaining visas move back home to start companies, says Vivek Wadhwa, executive in residence, Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University....Nationwide, these immigrant-founded companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005. The majority of these immigrant entrepreneurs came from India, United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, Japan and Germany.
Immigration reform should not be code for keeping people out. Rather, we need reform so we can assure the people we need come in. This should include both unskilled workers and skilled workers.
But more importantly, we should be actively recruiting immigrants who want to come to our system of free enterprise to start their businesses. This is no less important for today's world than it was to bring in the scientists we needed in the 1950s and 1960s to help fight the cold war. It we want to remain a world power, we need to continue to have a strong economy that leads the world.
Economic growth today is almost solely the domain of entrepreneurs. Let's attract the best, the brightest, the most passionate entrepreneurs the world has to offer. However, what ever we do, we must not create a bureaucratic system that controls what industry or type of business we think that we want them to start.
Let's qualify them by making sure that they have the basic experience and skills necessary to be successful business owners, and then turn them lose. Look at their education, their experience in business and as business owners, and their legal record.
Give preference to those educated in the US. Again from the TechJournal South article:
These immigrants come to the U.S. primarily to study and many received advanced degrees in engineering, math and science fields. But the once three-year process for getting a green card that permits them to work in the United States now stretches to six or even 10 years sometimes, says Wadhwa. Rather than deal with lengthy delays, they take their advanced U.S. educations and go home to start new companies.
Let them in -- or in many cases let them stay here -- and let them compete and innovate in a free market. If not, we are feeding competing economies with the entrepreneurs who will help those countries supplant our global economic strength.
(Thanks to Jim Stefansic for passing this along).
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