Voices: The Future Is Not Allowed To Stay In The USA

The following voice you will hear is that of Craig Montuori. 

He is responding to a question posted on a site that has recently been compared, favorably, to wikipedia. His words will give you a reason to believe that assessment may very well be true.

The site is quora.com. i should note that I am a member of this free site that rewards people for asking great questions and giving great answers. It is a  meritocracy of intellect and some think it may be the direction education is heading in the not too distant future.

I wanted to introduce the site to readers but also to emphasize the importance of the issue. I have posted on this blog and many other places on the need to the government to rethink its policy on restricting the best and brightest international students and entrepreneurs from staying in this county.
Greg is far more articulate than I am so I am letting him speak here.

First, I will post the question and then his response. Finally, I will list some of his credentials. A Cal Tech grad, Craig is the model of what makes the US still the best place for businesses to begin. But if we do not listen to him and many of his colleagues  this may soon not be the case.
****************************************************************

U.S. Immigration: Should highly skilled international students (incl. Bachelors, Masters, Doctorate) be given Green Cards?

The short answer is yes.

For purely selfish American reasons, the answer is yes. Highly skilled immigrants are productive, 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 9 jobs in San Francisco, had raised over $1M in funding. His visa rejected, he 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. He's now up to 16 employees in SF as Cruisewise 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 contribute much more to America than they consume. By partnering with Americans, 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 up a team of 10 in the UK to support him. The office those people worked in needed to be cleaned, 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:

• http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/...
• http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/06/...

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 leads 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.

  

********************************************************************************

• Currently:
  Startup Visa - Political Coordinator for the informal coalition of VCs, founders supporting the bills; admin of StartupVisa FB page; admin of http://startupvisa.wordpress.com; admin of http://www.startupvisa.com/
  
  Founder and Executive Director, PolitiHacks - Making Politics Suck Less for Startups
• Graduate of California Institute  of Technology '08, aerospace engineering.
• Graduate of University of San Francisco, '11, MA Public Affairs.
• Moved immediately into political staffery, generally data management and modeling.
• Moved to Silicon Valley in February to work on a startup with college friends to make an email reader for lawyers to handle millions of case emails better and for cheaper than $3 per page read (since shut down)
• Became a Quora admin (Jan '11)