Should Highly Skilled International Students Be Given Green Cards?

Posted by wanpinfo in Blog

Sep
5

The short answer is yes; yes we should grant more highly-skilled, highly-educated immigrants green cards.

For purely selfish American reasons, the answer is yes. Highly skilled immigrants are productive, net-positive members of American society, just like highly skilled Americans. This country has a certain median production per capita, and anything that increases that median means more economic growth for America. More economic growth means more and better opportunities for native-born Americans.

Take Amit Aharoni as an example; Israeli-born, Stanford GSB-education, StartupChile alumnus. By November ’11, through his company Cruisewise, he had created nine jobs held by Americans in San Francisco, and had raised over $1.6M in funding. His visa rejected, Amit left for Canada, continuing to run his SF-based company from Vancouver via Skype. ABC picked up his story and boom, Amit got a visa. Amit’s Cruisewise is now up to sixteen employees in SF as the company continues to grow and prosper.

I’ll leave the pure statistics to folks like the Kauffman Foundation or Vivek Wadhwa, but this set of immigrants contributes much more to America than they consume. By partnering with Americans to found and grow jobs, creating companies, the country benefits from their success. With a single missing founder — like Elon Musk of South Africa — PayPal might not have succeeded and grown into the success story it has.

Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook told a story last August about an extremely skilled developer from the UK. His visa application was denied, and since the developer was so talented, Facebook simply hired a team of ten in the UK to support him. The office those people worked in needed to be cleaned, and it needed office supplies. All of that secondary spending, all of those jobs, were a direct loss to the American economy because that one visa was rejected.

The question becomes who decides what highly skilled means. Current proposals range from simply stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign graduate to only for technical (STEM) PhDs. Many VCs who are facilitators for the success of entrepreneurs and interested in growing a stronger entrepreneurial community have spoken out in support:

Some actual bills have been proposed in the US Congress containing STEM Green Card provisions; most require that the graduate get a job in a technical field rather than explicitly spelling out a path where jobs creators can also qualify:

Startup Act (2.0), S.1965/S.3217
SMART Jobs Act, S.3192
STAR Act, S.3185
STAPLE Act, H.R.399

Other proposals, like Startup Visa, require more initiative — separate from but usually correlated with higher education — to create something economically valuable to the country in order to qualify for the visa and convert it to a green card.

Whether through academic research, industrial manufacturing, or entrepreneurial disruption, these are the people who will work with highly-skilled, driven Americans to help create the future. There is no cap to success in a world where we acknowledge that we can grow the economic pie; more ingredients simply lead to more success.

And I’m a selfish guy. I want that success to be American; no matter her country of birth, if she’s building the future, I want it to be built here.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/09/04/should-highly-skilled-international-students-be-given-green-cards/