I also fear that a "win" here will allow legislators to push off further reform (e.g. "we just did something") instead of serve as a meaningful stepping stone.
As a community, we will still need immigration reform legislation should the White House agree to push this change through at the regulatory level. Legislation is the only way we get a viable, sustainable solution. And the proposal in the comprehensive immigration bill was the best policy proposal yet, with their non-immigrant X visa and immigrant (green card) EB-6.
But to get this small, incremental step done through executive action doesn't involve legislators (except in the negative, aka the effort saw YC going around the Hill asking folks to not link any hypothetical change in this space to the much more politically controversial changes coming about deportations).
So while there is a large change Congress continues to do nothing on startup visa or larger immigration reform for the next several years, it won't be because a potential win here will give legislators an out.
Finally, yes, the whole point of startup visa is to avoid the increasingly contentious debate over H-1Bs and foreign employees. Founders are small in number but very clearly hire Americans and directly drive economic growth. Politically, it's a no-lose proposition.
So it was a feature, not a bug, that this push focused on founders rather than employees, was small and incremental, and was executive focused rather than legislative.
Perhaps one appeal of this approach, though, is that this effort aligns better with legislator's "bottom line" - if you look at their bottom line as job creation.
I don't know enough to say what the correct position is on H-1Bs, but I know that many people believe strongly in both sides. We're too small a community to solve the problem here, so all we can do is be caught up in it and have our proposals die like flies on a spider's web.
When I say we in this case, I mean the HN crowd and similar. We as in Americans can debate this issue all you like. But if I want a startup visa, then I want to avoid getting caught up in the H-1B debate.
A bargain! For you.
I myself am an Indian citizen. I studied in Boston, moved to California with an upperclassman and started a company during my OPT. The company is fairly well-rooted while bootstrapped, but doesn't have massive funding in place yet. Towards the end of my OPT, I tried to apply for the H1B just because I wanted to continue working on the company I started, and because I'd come to call California home.
Are you suggesting my team find an American engineer of equal skill take my place in the tiny company I started for the no-salary I was earning, as cofounder? I'm confused.
As it stands I didn't get through the H1B lottery two years in a row, and am now pursuing this O1A visa, although this being my first startup (and job) out of college my track record is a bit sparse.
On to you: your situation is the exception to the common use of h1bs. You're probably a giant minority. The common use as far as I know of h1bs is to hold down wages of engineering. Microsoft and yahoo laying off engineers while simultaneously applying for h1b visas trivially demonstrates the lie in the "engineer shortage" nonsense.
Employee friendly changes to h1b visas could include many things: removing the tie between the sponsoring company and the employee (so if he or she is underpaid he or she can easily switch jobs); or aggressive investigation of prevailing wage requirements (oops there goes Infosys' business model); or 5+ year bans on h1b applications post layoffs. But bluntly, I think we have more than enough visas already. I'd change my mind if I saw engineering wages rise, concerted action on the part of ceos to help control housing costs, and concerted action on the part of ceos to help fix US education and increase the domestic engineering pipeline; or concerted action on the part of ceos to police visa fraud (see infosys, or epic systems, etc).
Re: the one I know the most about, "removing the tie between the sponsoring company and the employee (so if he or she is underpaid he or she can easily switch jobs)" This is partially done already in AC21: http://immigrationroad.com/green-card/ac21-portability-chang...
The key word is portability, which is a much, much weaker tie between the sponsoring company and the employee, both in terms of job title/salary and switching employers.
However, it's incomplete because employer-based (EB) green card applications aren't portable, so there's still a horrible incentive system there that has a huge negative impact on H-1B-affected wages. Green card portability was included in S744, the comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) legislation, that just failed.
That said, these are all legislative changes. With the failure of CIR, it will be more than a few years before another major effort is attempted on immigration, and at least until January 2017 until even small immigration reforms will be proposed in Congress.
Flatly, there is no chance of any legislative effort succeeding in coming months or even years.
I was raising the point regarding my position because that seemed to be the thesis of the article -- for people more in my position than for employees of companies on the scale of Microsoft, etc. We are not entering the US with the objective of taking other people's jobs. The only reason I applied for the H1B was because it was the legit path with the most reasonable chance to get cleared. I think it's the wrong kind of visa for a founder to attempt to get, there just isn't a better one.
So YC and people like me are hoping for a visa similar to the O1A, except right now that is expensive to file, vague in the conditions that need to be cleared, and usually needs you to foot a fat lawyer bill too. And it's a bit of a stretch to be applied to founders. Essentially, the existing visas are all hardly different from 10-15 (or more) years ago, times have changed, and the government has done nothing to accommodate the changes in the economy.
Refusing to support companies asking for friendly visa changes for free is employees' best bet at getting said companies to support employee-friendly changes.