Associated Press: “US colleges court foreign entrepreneurs who need visas”

Summer can be a difficult time for H-1B applicants. For those lucky ones who were selected in the lottery, they are nevertheless nervously awaiting the results of their H-1B petition. Those who weren’t selected in the H-1B lottery are most likely busy scrambling to come up with alternatives to possibly allow them to work in the US. As Liz has pointed out, it is frustrating for both foreign nationals and immigration practitioners since the H-1B is the perfect fit for so many people, and the only thing stopping them is that they were not selected in the random lottery.

But there is finally some positive news for certain rejected H-1B applicants. Certain universities in the US are now stepping up to provide solutions to the unreliability of the H-1B lottery process. Since employees of universities—or workers who provide services to universities—are exempt from the H-1B cap and thus can apply for an H-1B at any time and are not subject to the random lottery, schools are creating “global entrepreneur in residence" programs to allow entrepreneurial foreign nationals who qualify for an H-1B to work part-time on campus, often as mentors, while they develop their businesses.  

"This movement came about because of challenges that student visa holders were beginning to face when they had completed a program," Bill Stock, a Philadelphia attorney and the current president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), tells the AP. "There really aren't a lot of other visas that would allow someone to work temporarily."

One such school to offer this program is University of Massachusetts. Created as part of a 2014 Jobs Bill, the program, called the “Global Entrepreneur in Residence Pilot Program,” aims to “attract and retain more qualified entrepreneurs and their growing companies within Massachusetts” by providing “valuable, relevant part-time work opportunities which will initiate a cap-exempt H-1B visa application process.” The end goal for this program is to encourage and allow new high skill jobs to develop in Massachusetts. To be eligible, candidates must be a start-up entrepreneur in a leadership position (CEO, co-founder, or similar position) within an early-stage venture, have a master’s degree or above in a STEM or related business field, and the candidate’s start-up venture must be headquartered in Massachusetts and able to affiliate with a venture center within UMass Boston or UMass Lowell. Since it started in 2014, the AP reports that the UMass program has helped twenty graduates obtain H-1B visas, and their businesses have created 260 jobs, according to the school.

Critics accuse the universities of exploiting a legal loophole in filing these H-1B petitions, since Congress created the exemption partly to help colleges hire researchers. The AP reports that in a February letter to US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa called the practice a "backhanded attempt" to skirt federal rules and a "seemingly unlawful" interpretation of the law.

College officials say they are operating within the law and they’re only addressing the problems created by the H-1B lottery system. As more international students come to US schools—and more schools recruit international students—many of these students who want to stay in the country are instead forced to leave the US due to limited H-1Bs. "Massachusetts says goodbye to over 1,000 graduate students who otherwise want to stay and start a company," William Brah, who leads the global entrepreneur program at the UMass Boston campus, tells the AP. "I mean, it's stupid. You couldn't come up with a more flawed immigration system if you tried."

Along with UMass, smaller entrepreneur programs have recently formed at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Alaska-Anchorage, and Alaska Pacific University, which accept a combined six graduates per year. Babson College is now taking applications for up to ten entrepreneurs, and the City University of New York is looking for eighty business owners from around the world for their program. "We wanted to try to find some way that would make it possible for an entrepreneur to come to the country, without us having to pay them to do it," Andy Holtz, chief of the program, tells the AP.

At Babson, master’s graduate and entrepreneur Abhinav Sureka and his company's two co-founders—both international students—are considering applying for the college's new program. They've raised $73,000 for their company, and are working on plans to produce a high-tech portable tea brewer. "What if we don't get a visa?" Sureka tells the AP. "We can't continue work in the US, and the amount of time we have spent on this project is all wasted."

Wall Street Journal: “Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups”

A new non-partisan study on entrepreneurship shows that immigrants started more than half of current US-based startups valued at $1 billion or more, lending credibility to the claim that immigration benefits the US economy. The study, from the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in Virginia, shows that immigrants play a “key role in creating new, fast-growing companies.” Immigrants, the study shows, have started more than half (forty-four of eighty-seven) of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion dollars or more; moreover, immigrants are key members of management or product development teams in over seventy percent of these companies. Using public data and information from the companies, the study found that among the billion dollar startup companies, immigrant founders have created an average of approximately 760 jobs per company in the US, and the collective value of the forty-four immigrant-founded companies is $168 billion, close to half the value of the stock markets of Russia or Mexico.

India was the leading country of origin for the immigrant founders of billion dollar companies with fourteen, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom with eight each, Israel with seven, Germany with four, China with three, France with two, Ireland with two, and twelve other countries with one. The three highest valued US companies with immigrant founders include car-hailing service Uber Technologies, data-software company Palantir Technologies, and rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies.

Stuart Anderson, the author of the study and the foundation’s executive director, says the findings show that the US economy could benefit even more from foreign-born entrepreneurs if it were easier for them to obtain visas, since currently it can be difficult for foreign-born entrepreneurs to grow their companies because of the many difficulties and delays in obtaining work visas and Green Cards. The study argues that a “startup visa” to enable foreign nationals who start companies and create jobs would be an important addition to the US immigration system. “Who is going to invest in a company if the founder of the company may not be able to stay in the U.S.?” Anderson said in the Wall Street Journal. Many start-ups also face problems hiring new personnel because of the low quota of H-1B temporary visas, which have been decided by random lottery in recent years and is thus not a reliable category for skilled workers.

Additionally, the study argues that new immigration restrictions would likely prevent many future cutting-edge companies from being established in the United States:

Based on an examination of the biographies of company founders, if S. 2394, a bill by Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL), had been in effect over the past decade, few if any of the billion dollar startup companies with an immigrant founder would have been started in the United States. That measure would impose a variety of hurdles before any foreign national could be employed by a U.S. company on an H-1B visa (typically the only practical way for a high-skilled foreign national to work in America), including, in most cases, working at least 10 years abroad before obtaining a visa in America.

While tech leaders including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have called for increasing the number of H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers, critics argue that many industries that want more H-1B visas are simply looking for cheaper foreign labor.  Mother Jones examined companies who allegedly used the H-1B program to ultimately outsource jobs from US workers, and a recent lawsuit charged that Disney colluded to replace US workers with H-1B foreign workers. The EB-JOBS Act of 2015, introduced last July as one solution for entrepreneurs, proposed to provide a two-year Green Card that would be revoked if certain financial and job-creation requirements are not met, has not proceeded because of the standstill in immigration reform.

Immigration Impact: "High-Tech Immigrant Entrepreneurs are Crucial to Local Economies"

Immigration Impact examines a report by the Kauffman Foundation on the impact of high-tech immigrant entrepreneurs on local economics:

Specifically, the report emphasizes the importance of “open and culturally diverse” environments in fostering high-tech entrepreneurship in metropolitan areas.  This is true for both immigrants and the U.S.-born. However, the study found that “higher ethnic diversity and a larger share of the foreign-born population are crucial factors in attracting or fostering immigrant high-tech entrepreneurship on the metropolitan level.”

Moreover, Dane Stangler, vice president of Research & Policy at the Kauffman Foundation, notes: "'Because immigrants are far more likely to start businesses – particularly high-tech companies – than are the native-born, their importance in the U.S. economy is increasing[.]" Not surprising then that some cities have strategies to attract such entrepreneurs.

The report is titled "Lessons for U.S. Metro Areas: Characteristics and Clustering of High-Tech Immigrant Entrepreneurs" and is viewable along with white paper here.