America Will Fall Behind Without Immigrant Entrepreneurs

In France, they call it the “Tech Visa.” Also known as the “Talent Visa,” it is a fast-tracked residence permit for startup founders, employees, and investors. In Canada, the “Startup Visa” provides permanent residency for immigrant entrepreneurs with innovative global businesses that create jobs for Canadians. There are other similar classifications in Chile, the U.K., and Australia to name just a few. And even in China, tech leaders are actively calling for the government to reform immigration rules to woo job-producing technology talent.

In the United States, it was to be called the International Entrepreneur Rule, and it was supposed to go into effect on July 17. The idea is to allow immigrant entrepreneurs with ideas to build their businesses (and the jobs that come with them) here in the U.S. Last year, I applauded the development as a necessary step in the global battle for talent. Today, I am greatly disappointed to learn that the Trump Administration has called for the Rule’s delay, and has said it is considering scrapping the program before it even gets off the ground. Sadly, the politics of immigration have trumped sound policy around job creation.

I understand that immigration reform is a deeply controversial and contested topic, but job creation and economic growth are not. Without immigration policies that enable us to compete on a global stage, we will continue to lose talented immigrant founders, students that we often educate in America, to other countries — countries that are all too willing to become magnets for talent.

President Trump has stated that he is intensely focused on bringing jobs back to the middle of the country — to the people who feel left behind by the forces of globalization and technology. But we cannot turn back the clock. In order to provide real economic growth, we must focus on building the companies and jobs of the future. Immigrant entrepreneurs play a critical role in that process. Roughly 40% of our Fortune 500 companies — America’s most iconic companies — were started by immigrants.

The International Entrepreneur Rule would have helped ensure the U.S. remains the most innovative, entrepreneurial nation, and a job creating powerhouse. I highlighted an example of the benefits of startup visas in my book The Third Wave:

“It’s not that foreigners aren’t founding companies anymore. Rather, they’re being turned away from the United States, making it more likely that they’ll try to starting a business elsewhere, either at home or in a more hospitable country. Snapdeal was co-founded by a Wharton graduate, Kunal Bahl, but he was forced to relocate when he couldn’t get a visa to stay in the United States. By 2015, Snapdeal was worth $5 billion and employed more than 5,000 people — in India.”

So let’s be clear: a graduate from President Trump’s alma mater, Wharton, wanted to create jobs in Pennsylvania, a state Trump won largely because of a lack of jobs. Instead, its founder was kicked out of the country, and created the jobs in India, instead of Pennsylvania. That likely wouldn’t have happened if the International Entrepreneur Rule was in place. Many of those 5,000 jobs would likely have been in Pennsylvania, and other parts of the United States.

As other nations move forward with creating startup friendly environments that welcome immigrants, we are moving backwards. The American economy is an entrepreneurial ecosystem and today’s delay costs us an unknown number of entrepreneurial founders and countless jobs their companies could have created.

The data is clear: immigrant entrepreneurs are job makers, not job takers. And today, we just pushed them to create jobs somewhere else.