Venture capitalist Paul Graham is proposing a new visa for immigrants looking to start new companies in the United States. The “Founder Visa” would allow 10,000 immigrants to create new companies in the U.S. if they can show they have a strong business plan. The current H1-B visa for skilled workers requires immigrants to work for U.S. companies and restricts them from starting their own businesses. Graham says the Founder Visa would forbid immigrants from working for U.S. companies and instead it would encourage the creation of new jobs for U.S. citizens. “If we assume four people per startup, which is probably an overestimate, that’s 2,500 new companies. Each year,” Graham writes in his proposal. “They wouldn’t all grow as big as Google, but out of 2,500 some would come close.” About a quarter of U.S. technology companies are started at least in part by immigrants. Moreover, a survey by Duke University professor Vivek Wadhwa found that more than 52 percent of Silicon Valley startup companies were created or co-created by people not born in the United States. Wadhwa calculated that in 2005, firms begun by immigrants earned $52 billion and provided jobs for 450,000 employees. On a global scale, Wadhwa found that one-fourth of all tech companies are founded by Indians–and yet the U.S. E2 visa, created in part for immigrant founders, blocks Indian entrepreneurs from entering the country. Graham says the U.S. government’s immigration restrictions are “the biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the U.S.”
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