A religion to get foreign entrepreneurs into Silicon Valley?
sprovoost.nl
sprovoost.nl
Let me explain. In 1967, my parents received a letter from a missionary who taught at a school in rural Honduras. She asked them to help her run the school.
9 months later, my parents packed up all their worldly belongings into a Chevy pickup truck, and drove south 5,000 miles. Their 3 children under 5 rode along side my parents in the front seat.
My parents worked for 20 years in Central America, running schools, starting at least 10 churches, rehabbing 3 youth camps, doing refugee work ( Nicaraguan revolution happened then ), started a seminary, did literacy work, etc...
Most of their time was spent building community, getting people together to talk about shared values and beliefs, and helping people work together to build organizations that could help others.
I've spent most of my life hanging around missionaries. I actually dropped out of Bible school 20 years ago. My original plan was to be a missionary in the middle of a jungle somewhere. (True story). Last thing in the world I wanted to do was to stay in the US and start a business. Oops. Point is. I know missionaries.
Five years ago, my wife and I moved to Silicon Valley with all our wordly possessions in a moving van. And, we started work on our startup. Hackers & Founders is all about building community, helping other people connect and talk about shared values (building startups, and hacking cool stuff together), and enabling them to build startups that can help themselves, and their customers.
We're going to be building educational resources: Hackers & Founders University, a physical coworking space (at some point), small groups ( Hackers & Founders @ Lunch ), large events with a speaker (preacher?), and general community building at our networking events.
Missionaries and founders are zealots. They generally take huge risks for the sake of their quixotic beliefs and ideals. They are passionate and evangelistic about promoting what they believe in. They build communities of customers, and try their best to serve them.
Misionaries == Founders && Startups == a religion.
Laura (my wife and H&F cofounder) and I often joke around that we're building the Church of the Startup with Hackers & Founders.
The Mormons generally use Religious Worker (R) visas in the United States (and often similar ones internationally).
Please do not actually attempt to convince a consular officer that you are the representative of an entrepreneurial religion. The time it takes to reject your application -- which is as-night-follows-day inevitable -- is time that the officer could have been using to examine and approve someone who has a legitimate case for a visa.
If you're willing to invest the effort into reverse engineering the various court rulings on religion then you could probably get away with it, but you would also need a certain amount of traction first. While the supreme court usually strikes down protections for new religions, in all of their rulings they have been extremely careful to explain why such-and-such a protection shouldn't be granted in this specific instance, so as not to completely bar the creation of new religions in general.
Q: Do you worship someone?
A: Yes.
Q: Good! Does he live in the clouds or in some Great Beyond?
A: No he lives in Palo Alto.
Q: Sorry, that's not allowed. We reject your religion on the ground of not being spooky/irrational/superstitious/ambiguous enough. Next please!
A: I believe in faeries!
Q: Too late. Plus that's not a serious religion. Faeries aren't real. Don't be silly.
The government gets to define everything for government purposes. I'm not sure why this should surprise you.
Furthermore Buddhism and Confucianism are recognized as religions in the US for census and other purposes, yet both don't worship deities. Confucianism is a life-philosophy based around the teachings of Confucius and Buddhism is a life-philosophy based around the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama.
The major problem with something like that as I've seen it is that any arrangement or economy between people is inherently political, so the group would have to share a lot of goals and beliefs. Somebody needs to write a great book (or pamphlet) a few hackers could agree to get behind.
The core problem was diverse goals. The entire group each time (I somehow made this mistake TWICE) had a hard time coming to common solutions around the most trivial decisions.
Until you have something like a manifesto with a long set of explanations of what will be expected of everyone, you shouldn't even try to START forming the group. No more than a set of 3-4 friends should write the manifesto, either, or it won't have enough teeth.
And there's a downside here, too: If you're going to live together with a lot of people with shared rules, the one thing you DON'T want is a lot of cultural diversity, at least not before the rules are set down and the new "diverse" members have bought into them.
I've seen a community with strict vegans who wouldn't ever attend a meal where meat was served and other members who wouldn't eat if there wasn't a hefty meat portion. Now everyone gets their own kitchens, but the optional 2-3 times a week "common meals" were a strong way to stay connected with others in the community -- except in that they were also a source of conflict, for meat/no-meat and other reasons.
tl;dr: Living together with (say) 30 other people is somewhat like being in a marriage with 30 other people, only with fewer benefits. At least in most such communities.
Btw, remember the religious worker visa being officially excluded from GC petition Premium Processing (15 days fast track) implemented for various employment based categories in the 2007 for the exact reason of being the category with the highest fraud found by the official investigation? One can imagine how bad the situation have been for the government to start officially "discriminate" against religion :)
http://www.murthy.com/news/n_prorev.html
Why it isn't surprising that self-righteous people who think that they are owners of highest and the only truth [ and thus entitled to not pay their fair share ] are also the most fraud perpetrating?
In any case, silicon valley already has its own set of highly evolved spiritual beliefs. And no matter how much research you did I think it would be very difficult to impose some sort of external religion on top of that without changing the sorts of relationships that people have with each other, which I'd be hesitant to mess with too much since that is sort of the secret sauce of the place.
I live in Northeast Thailand, and there is a hive of Mormons not too far from here who always travel on bicycle in pairs, and always wearing black trousers, white shirts and little black name tags. Local people just think they are crazy and ignore them. I have know idea how they work out visas out here. But I do know they have a lot of under the table political clout in many countries mostly because of money paid over many decades. When I lived in Hong Kong, I remember someone telling me that in 50 years they had only converted a handful of people.
Peace.
it is simple - a PAC and a fund paying for the PR and lobby to change the law. Until there is no money interested in solving the problem ...
Though if you look here http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/H1BvisaCapH1BquotaSystem/ref... - this year half H1B quota is still unused, so i'm not sure that there is really that big of a problem to be solved.
Some nationals (China, India, etc...) may be in for a long wait at the final stage of the process - actual GC or adjustment once the petition is approved. It has nothing to do with being entrepreneurial or religious immigrant - it is about officially regulated racial makeup of allocation of the GC numbers and thus it is completely different problem. EDIT: strike the last one. It has been long time since i looked at it - http://www.hooyou.com/visabulletin/index.html - looking at the "Current" even for Mexico and Philippines it is obvious that the religion does also have the preferential treatment here as well (and numbers taken from one category usually decrease the numbers available for other categories).
Why not a mail-order spouse programme for founders? Surely there must be a lot of Americans, especially with the financial crisis, who would be willing to take a bet on a founder's future income in exchange for a green card. You could make proposal pitch decks with Lessons Learned from previous marriages.
And if it doesn't work out there's always Series B.
In all seriousness, I always find these discussions about immigration baffling in part because my dad was career military and so was my ex husband, so I have known a great many people who immigrated to the US by marrying a soldier (mostly foreign women marrying American men). In some cases, there was a lot of paperwork and all that, so it wasn't always smooth and easy. But I have spent most of my life surrounded by immigrants who never dealt with the types of immigration issues that routinely get discussed on HN. I know someone who wants to immigrate and I find myself frustrated with not knowing how to help them because this type of immigration is so alien to my life experience and I just don't know where to begin. Some part of my brain cannot comprehend why on earth this should be so hard. It so doesn't jibe with my personal experiences.
I'd also like to see a list of nations that Americans with some sort of programming background can emigrate to with no hassle. Nothing special, just the sort of ease of moving in that they expect the US to provide to their people.
Have University friends who immigrated to Sweden, Great Britain, Netherlands, Germany, Canada, mathematics or programming, and their immigration hassles were less/faster or comparable to mine (for example no double labor certification like for H1 and GC in the US, and some of them even did 2 immigrations one after another while i was doing one). On the other side nobody of them has made such money like some of my friends here in the US :)