Startup Visa D.O.A., and Startup America Just a Giant Press Release? | Hacker News Reader

Startup Visa D.O.A., and Startup America Just a Giant Press Release?

techcrunch.com

49 pointsjoshbert17 comments

I sent my immigration lawyer a link to http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/14/finally-a-startup-visa-that... about 2 weeks ago and this was his response:

"Kulveer, from his lips to God's ears. Frankly, I don't see it happening...such is the gridlock in Congress, where immigration issues, any immigration issues, even sensible solutions to obvious problems like this one, tend to be held hostage to a mindset of 'once you've secured the southern border, we can talk - until then, don't bring us immigration issues to vote on'. The need is obvious, the solution good, but the environment fractured and hostile to the degree that makes those normal attributes of legislation not enough to see it through. No-one will be more pleased than me if I'm wrong!"

The most unfortunate part of this is that 'the President would only support the Startup Visa in the context of “comprehensive immigration reform”.'

If it is valuable to attract and retain the top entrepreneurial talent from around the world, we should enact that policy ASAP, without holding it captive to the political grenade of illegal immigration.

Or maybe not everyone has the same priorities as you. When I was living in the US, my top priority was comprehensive immigration reform so my fiance could have the right to work so we could live a normal life.

What is good for the country and good for us as individuals in the short term doesn't always line up. For a country to work well, one needs to look beyond his own needs. I think that immigration needs to be revamped, but it's a huge task, and it doesn't make sense to logjam all related issues.

The parent's point about political sensitivity is very important - it makes it much, much less likely to happen in the near future, and it doesn't improve the situation of that other bill very much. It's just not a strong enough motivator politically, because there aren't many voters in the startup community.

This is a strictly worse outcome, regardless of your priorities, unless your goal is to keep highly educated foreigners from staying.

I'm just curious ... how many of the people who are upset about this have been working for the DREAM Act (which has also being held hostage to 'comprehensive immigration reform')?

Business as usual in Washington. Anyone really surprised? Every time it looks like something good will come out of there, the politicians manage to screw it up with amazing precision and panache.

I can't believe you guys haven't figured it out yet. Who cares about startups? If you want this to get passed, just call it the Patriot Visa.

This piece doesn't make much sense to me. The first paragraph talked about how Obama is interested in emulating China's and India's focus on science and engineering. The second paragraph says the Startup America plan needs more substance: a way for foreign-born entrepreneurs to start companies here and a leveling of the playing field for entrepreneurs wanting to solve government problems.

I don't know about the situation in India, but here in China the barriers for foreign-born entrepreneurs starting companies and the barriers for entrepreneurs wanting to solve government problems are both very high. The US already has the comparative advantage in this regard. Isn't the real disadvantage that most Americans aren't very interested in science or engineering careers?

What he meant was that if those foreign entrepreneur could not stay in the US, they will go back to their own country to create jobs there. Therefore, the US would lose this entrepreneur along with the technology and the job he/she creates.

If governments have to aggregate bills together because they are incapable of considering individual ones, do you really expect them to ever produce well-rounded pieces of legislation?

Looks like government can't scale.

My cynical take is that sometimes these things are packaged together, knowing they will fail, just so one party can use it as a negative campaigning tool in the next election: "Party X voted against <insert topic>"

From the end:

> There is not one example of a Government-sponsored tech cluster—anywhere in the world—that has worked. Yet our leaders talks about clusters as if they are the secret sauce for entrepreneurship.

Because startups are not real beneficiaries of tech cluster funding. These office parks end up filled with call centers and branch offices of large companies like IBM and Dell. They're effectively another subsidy for established firms with political influence.

An advice to all Silicon Valley investors: get up off your asses and look elsewhere. Europe is especially teeming with great startups to fund.

Wow, this is such a disappointment, I hope the people who screwed this up have as hard of jobs keeping their job as those of us trying to actually help this country by creating jobs.

Is there a way to hack the political process to get this moving ? Can individual states bypass the federal government with some kind of visa ? Some law that this can piggyback on ?

No, individual states cannot issue visas. The border is controlled by the federal government (specifically, the Department of Homeland Security).

One thing you can do is sign up for votizen and send a message to your representatives here, however:

https://www.votizen.com/issues/startupvisa/

Unfortunately the startup visa is dead and will stay dead for some time. The only way something like this will get through is by piggybacking it onto some other bill.

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