Ask HN: What will happen to Obama's new “startup visa”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What will happen to Obama's new “startup visa”?

9 pointspavlov6 comments

Back in August, the Obama administration introduced a plan for a new "International Entrepreneur Rule". It is an immigration permit aimed for startup entrepreneurs. Rather than a visa, it's actually a "parole" and doesn't lead to any permanent residence permit.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12367071

The rule hasn't even gone into effect yet. As an Obama executive order concerning immigration, it is one of the things that Trump has promised to annul on his first day in office.

Do you see any chance of this rule surviving under a Trump administration?

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I think this rule has a fair chance to survive:

1) Trump hates illegal immigrants. But Startup Visa (or any kind of Visa) implies only legal immigration path.

2) Trump doesn't like that immigrants take away jobs from locals. But startups tend to create new jobs, reducing unemployment.

3) Peter Thiel (Trump's new tech advisor) is a famous investor and a partner at Y Combinator. This guy needs new startups. Most likely, he will lobby Startup Visa initiative.

My worry is that Trump's instinct will be to "repeal and replace". This startup visa initiative will be cancelled simply because it was championed by Obama, and a new one written by Republicans will be promised... But because it's not a priority compared to all the other stuff going on, the new initiative will never actually get written.

It took years of lobbying to get a "startup visa" from Obama's administration. It's a shame if this issue gets reset once again.

The dysfunction in US immigration is that we import millions of low-skill workers when there's already a tragic surplus of low-skill labor. I don't think there's much appetite to cut back on high-skill/investor immigration.

Frankly, I think it's more likely that Trump will want to require people assimilate and become Americans then get a temporary visa.

This is a tragedy for our lower class, who do not have the skillset to produce wealth increasing businesses and have to compete for a non-growing share of work.

It's not fair to them.

> As an Obama executive order concerning immigration, it is one of the things that Trump has promised to annul on his first day in office.

I don't know if you're referring to his "Contract with the American Voter", but it states cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama . IANAL, but I don't think this qualifies as unconstitutional.

Then, it would probably be very easy to realize a PR campaign showing the startup visa as a great way to bring jobs to the US, so even though I have no real answer to the question, it would sound rather logical that this visa plan is here to stay.

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