Startup Visa: Time For Action!

Note to the United States Congress: It's About Jobs, Stupid.

In the March 6th show, "This Week In Startups" (#TWiST) Jason Calacanis calls on President Obama to place his top priority on jobs creation and entrepreneurship. I agree. Yes, health care is important, but without jobs, health care at any level is impossible to provide. We need jobs. If this administration does not start inacting policies to stimulate job creation (beyond fixing pot holes), they may find themselves out of their jobs in 2012. Most jobs in the U.S., (about 80%) are provided by small business -- not by Fortune 500 companies.

One of the real economic hangovers from the Bush administration is the highly restrictive policy toward immigration, and the H-1B visas policy. The Obama administration has not changed the xenophobic detritus left by his predecessor. We used to welcome foreign students to attend our best universities and colleges. Today, the foreign students able to get into the U.S. to study are sent home once they graduate. Does this make any sense? Job growth depends on innovation, entrepreneurs... start-ups! Along with those diplomas from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, NYU, UCLA, USC, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Wharton, (name your school here), we should be giving these foreign students visas with a welcome basket.

In a 2007 Business Week article, Vivek Wadhwa writes; "In 25.3% of technology and engineering companies started in the U.S. from 1995 to 2005, at least one key founder was foreign-born... Nationwide, these immigrant-founded companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005."

Now there is something we can all do to call attention to the problem with a brilliant solution: Startup Visa is a grassroots effort to create jobs by extending Visas to those who found companies and locate them in the United States. On February 24, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced the Start-Up Visa Act: legislation to modify the existing EB-5 Visa in order to drive job creation in the US and increase American global competitiveness. This would enable immigrant entrepreneurs who are creating new companies to secure visas to come to the United States, if there is investment capital available from a sponsoring US venture capital or angel investor of at least $100,000 in an equity financing of not less than $250,000.

Originally inspired by a Paul Graham essay, the Startup Visa movement began to pick up steam as Brad Feld and others began raising awareness of this critical issue. Dave McClure and Eric Ries eventually created a Startup Visa website and a 2gov forum to focus support for the issue.

I hope you will help support the Start-Up Visa Act. Please write about this important legislation on your blog, and promote though your social network activities.