"50% of firm founders [in Silicon Valley] are foreign born"
economist.com
economist.com
Just like I'd be willing to bet that americans living abroad are overrepresented as entrepreneurs wherever they happen to be living.
I disagree. I wouldn't be sanguine about it. Previous major waves of technical innovation were lead by well established Americans. Something has changed.
A plausible hypothesis (not that I'm convinced) is that high immigration has driven down wages in technical professions. So native born Americans are less inclined to bother.
I think it's important to point out that two American eras of high growth and prosperity had essentially zero immigration. From 1921 to 1965 immigration was practically nothing. This was a period of extreme American innovation.
Rather I think Americans dont take tough courses in college - ie science/technology courses. How many computer science (for eg:) MS courses even have Americans enrolled in them?
Americans take it easy in college. Heck, if I'd been born here I'd have done the same. :)
... because an army of H1Bs and green cards have driven down wages and thus the incentive to pursue science & tech careers? Seems at least plausible.
Uhm, what? Perhaps in raw numbers, but the world wars drove vast numbers of european intellectuals to the US.
Fifty percent of firm founders are foreign-born you say? OK. What percentage of valley residents are foreign-born? Or, hey...what percentage of foreign-born residents outside the valley start businesses. Without answers to these questions, the 50% stat is just a sound-bite.
The question that needs to be answered is: do immigrant technology workers found technology startups at a higher or lower rate than native-born technology workers? Surprisingly, I’ve never seen that question addressed. I’ve seen articles that imply an answer, but once I dig a bit it always seems that the data doesn’t actually justify the implied conclusion.
Nearly everyone in this thread is taking for granted that foreign workers are more entrepreneurial, and using this piece as some sort of external validation of that view. But the article is just regurgitating a sound-bite. Without context, there's no reason to believe that the cited statistic implies a meaningful conclusion.
Here's a clue: You're an artist with real ambition, so where do you go? Paris or New York. On arrival you notice the huge percentage of aspiring artists who are imports from all around the world. What does this mean?
1. Paris and New York are incapable of art and depend on foreigners.
2. Paris and New York have developed art scenes of such strength that they are known world-wide as the places to go if you have ambition.
#2, obviously. Well, not obvious if you're making cheap political shots, but whatever. SV is known all over the world as the destination for ambitious entrepeneurs and that has mathemetical ramifications of no polical meaning.
According to San Jose Business Journal, in 2003 36.5% were foreign born. http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2003/09/01/da...
I guess/estimate if you adjusted for those native-born who are either working at family businesses already (2nd or later generation of a family owned business), or are following their parent's lead on a trade or profession (son of lawyer becoming a lawyer, daughter of ob-gyn becoming a doctor), you would find that the quoted stats are not very important or relevant.
(just adding another data point to the discussion)
One of the perversities of this recession is that as the unemployment rate has risen, the job vacancy rate has risen, too. Manufacturing firms can’t find skilled machinists. Narayana Kocherlakota of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank calculates that if we had a normal match between the skills workers possess and the skills employers require, then the unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent, not 9.6 percent.
The Economist article expands upon this thesis for the high-tech industry. Just as there aren't enough skilled machinists, there also are not enough skilled founders in the domestic market.
OR being an outcast of any sort.
The analogy I think of is you're brain is like a clay pot being formed in your youth. Hard hands (hard experiences) either create something amazing or destroy you. And then your teenage years cure you into that state.
But thats all beside the point I was getting at - i'm saying facing significant adversity creates a unique type of person.
To put it into context, here in the UK there is no where really quite like it, in terms of supporting tech startups and harbouring a community that has such prestige and heritage from over the years. From our perspective Silicon Valley is always going to be seen as having greener grass than ours.
At my alma matter (Berkeley), I imagine it was quite high. Not so much due to the high paying internships (which do help limit the burden), but because CS students on average tended to come from quite affluent households.
The idea that we could draw in more founders just by letting them come here... seems like an easy win. All those startups and all the high skill workers they'd attract. Imagine the synergy of all that talent in one place. It could be the next renaissance.
That makes it 32% of all HNers who bothered to vote.
If you count those whose parents are immigrants, it jumps up to 52%.
Also, you are free to be paid as long as you are not resident of united states. This is where tourist visa is better.
Disclaimer: I am not a immigration lawyer and all of this is just my own opinion =))
You need a good lawyer, an investor willing to commit $200,000 (you might be able to get away with less) to the business so your cofounder can file for the visa for you, and the willingness to put your future in the hands of the cofounder, since they'll have ownership of the company on paper until you get your green card (You need a separate business agreement governing the business setup after you become a citizen)
Also do yourself a favor and get a Master's degree so you can file in the EB2 category (speeds up your green card process).