Visas for Foreign Entrepreneurs
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
I personally think that start-ups are already hard enough without having to contend with gratuitous bureaucratic roadblocks. You would be better off founding your company in your own country (assuming that we are talking about people from modern Western or Asian countries). Putting your dream at the mercy of bureaucrats is a recipe for disaster.
This is a little bit of a cry from the heart. The dramas I had, as an Australian wanting to work in France were just unbelievable - clerks that flatout refused to apply the rules, disintrested bosses, ridiculous catch-27 style rules in the first place, it was almost impossible to get a work visa, even as an engineer with more than 10 years experience. I even had to spend 6 months shuttling backwards and forward between London and Paris every week for 6 months whilst fighting the bureaucracy. And, as if the rest wasn't bad enough, the only way that I eventually got my paperwork approved was to get the personal support of the mayor of Paris. As an interesting aside, once I got passed the roadblock clerk, and passed up to the next stage where they deal with 'special' cases, the clerk couldn't understand why my application hadn't been approved straight-away.
Anyway, start-ups don't need distractions of that size.
And of course, they could always do this in Holland. Seriously, why not? It's not like a business never became successful in Holland.
Personally as someone who is dealing with US immigration bureaucracy, I am opposed to the founder visa because on the very long list of things that need to be fixed with immigration in America and that would also benefit the US economy, this one is item #217. We don't need yet another special interest carveout. No. The system needs to work in the best interests of the nation and to treat people with fairness and dignity. Aiming for anything less is just not even trying.
1) Replace employer-sponsored and lottery green cards with a points-based self-petitioning system that can be tuned annually according to the nation's needs. Such a system would award points for basic criteria for age, language, education and experience, with bonus points for experience in occupations for which there are shortages.
2) Eliminate H1B and its byzantine rules, replacing it with a simpler short-term work visa that has a 2 year limit and no renewal. Anything longer in not temporary, and falls in the category above (and if the person does not qualify for 1) then why is it necessary to hire this person and not an American?)
3) Crack down on USCIS backlogs. There is no excuse for it taking years to process visas. Quite apart from the fact that people people's live on hold for that wrong is unjust, it costs American businesses real money. If they need an expert in a certain field, they need it now, not at some indeterminate time.
Aside from that, I think you can attribute a lot of the differences to the simple fact that Vancouver doesn't have any highways going through it or anywhere near the downtown core.
I prefer it to San Fran, but given the 4 degree(C) weather with rain today, I can appreciate someone taking the opposing view.
OTOH, for sheer number of transients it's hard to beat SF.
In a similar thread, Microsoft opened a development office in Vancouver (well, outside of it) more/less because it was easier to bring offshore talent here than to Redmond. Given that it's only a 2 hour drive away, it seemed like a good example of more liberal immigration laws helping out. Although, the net effect of this seems to be that the Canadian office is really just a holding pattern for top talent who can't get an H1-B yet.
It's actually not easier, in 80% of the cases it takes 64 months for the visa to process.
http://www.canadavisa.com/federal-business-immigration-entre...
If you look at the "wait time" for your application (provided you managed to meet all the requirements, which are not trivial, BTW), on average it is about 1.5-2 years. What do you think will happen to these guys' startup/idea if they had to wait for a couple of years before they could start the business in Canada?
But if you're younger, have less to lose, and more appetite for risk, this can look unappealing. It acts as a kind of club that you have to break into, for one thing - too many young people in Europe work on the basis of short-term contracts rather than full-time pensionable positions.
FWIW, speaking as an Irishman living in the UK and holder of a H-1B visa, there's a lot to dislike about the Bay Area too, some of which has informed my decision not to move there (as yet). There's something about it as a place to live (outside of work) that feels like a hastily assembled holiday resort, with wooden buildings (I know, earthquakes), car orientation, shallowness of culture and institutionalization of recreation.
Wooden buildings are a problem? With regard to the rest of your complaints -- keep in mind it's a compliment to a superpower to blame all the world's ills on it. For such a small population we sure do rule it, eh?
For example, creating a limited company in Ireland cost me no more than 200 EUR or so and a couple of days. Most governmental administration was in the form of an annual return, but providing accounts isn't necessary for the first return. You send off your income tax monthly, and corporation tax (12.5%) yearly. And VAT isn't a concern until you hit a revenue threshold. The bigger problems in Ireland are networking, partnership opportunities, etc.
From what I've read of obligations on employers in California, the going is somewhat rougher. For example, I see that CA has an 800 USD annual tax for the equivalent, LLCs.
WRT to your boasts of ruling the world, I don't think it quite works that way. Current international trends are quite Westphalian in nature - the US military can't be stretched much further and soft power is fairly easily ignored. See e.g. http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/03/what_does... for some discussion of the limitations.
But to further parse your snarky bait: Maybe they're not so smart; or, maybe their estimation of "highest quality of life in the world" differs from yours; or, maybe it's because the U.S. is a wonderful place to start and grow businesses and families.
Why do people continue to believe that European social democracies have the highest quality of life, when people vote with their feet in the other direction?
PS: Consider the AIDS rate in Washington DC at ~3%. "Our rates are higher than West Africa" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03... However, other areas of the country are way below that, even as other groups are much worse. "Black men, with an infection rate of nearly 7 percent, carry the weight of the disease, according to the report, which also underscores that the District's HIV and AIDS population is aging. Almost 1 in 10 residents between the ages of 40 and 49 has the virus."
The economists usually praise mobility of the population. I wonder if the current state of affairs is simply due to historical reasons.
But then, is 1 equal to the other?
I don't think you'd see big imbalances between areas with roughly equivalent living standards.
But then someone who also hates noise would follow...
Even if it were allowed, many people would not move.
Really? That simply can't be right. Were there 24 million companies founded last year? I have to say that if I count all the people I know that have ever founded a company, let alone last year, it's nowhere near 8%.
You do it with laws that make it easy to start a company and that make it cost-effective to invest money in a local startup. Tax reductions are one way. Simple processes are another. Labor laws that distinguish between startups and established companies are yet another.
Here in Brazil we have labor laws that more or less make it prohibitively expensive you from legally starting a tech company, bureaucracy that's absolutely maddening, and an equally insane tax code.
Stopping people from moving isn't the solution to fostering innovation.
And that reminds me once more I still owe them a visit.
Haven't had proper vacations for a couple years.