Every time I publish a research paper on immigration or write an article for BusinessWeek or TechCrunch, the xenophobes rush out of their caves to launch mindless attacks. They fill the comment sections with bile, send me nasty emails and sometimes threaten to do me harm. I was convinced that my last BusinessWeek column on the Startup visa presented such a compelling argument that even these poor souls would support it.
After all, this visa is about creating American jobs and moving innovation here which would otherwise happen in other countries. We can boost the economy without any cost to taxpayers. It's not about admitting H-1B visa holders who sometimes make Americans compete for high-paying jobs, but bringing in entrepreneurs who expand the pie for everyone. Not only do the Democrats support this, but so do the Republicans (their thought leader, Newt Gingrich blogged about my previous TechCrunch post on immigration and his staff told me that he was a supporter of the startup visa). So this seems like a no-brainer.
But, no, logic doesn't prevail with this crowd. I got the same stream of hate mail that I'm used to, and the xenophobes hijacked the BusinessWeek reader feedback section again. Most of their statements are illogical and uneducated. But there are two potentially meaningful arguments which opponents of the startup visa make, which are worth discussing: that the founders we are bringing in aren't always the "best and brightest" and that there is already a visa category for geniuses called the O-1 visa.
I know we're not always bringing in the best and brightest. Most are just average techies. I can offer myself up as an example. When I came to this country in 1980 from Australia, I was just a low-level computer programmer. Yes, I took pride in being able to write the slickest Assembler code (anyone remember what this is?). But I was pretty average in my education and skills. I had no PhD. I had no patents. No one would ever have thought of giving me an O-1 visa. But I came, I worked hard, and I learned. And I developed ideas for how to make better software.
Years later, technology which I invented formed the basis of a software company which employed over 1,000 people and changed the way enterprise client-server systems were built. I don’t know my total value-add to the American economy but I certainly added hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of my two startups. And now I'm giving back to America by contributing my time and energy to 3 great universities, Duke, Harvard and UC-Berkeley.
Now let's discuss the genius visa. Any immigration attorney will tell you that qualifying for this visa is so hard that even Einstein wouldn't have cut it. You've got to have a perfect academic record, have topped every class you took and have as many as 10 independent authorities say you walk on water. I happened to meet someone at a talk I gave at Berkeley last week, who qualified for this. He has a remarkable story which shows how screwed up our immigration system is.
Alex Kosorukoff learned programming in high school in Russia and started working part-time as a software developer. He later joined Ivanovo State Power University and worked part-time as a researcher in a Russian-American joint venture. He came across several American books on entrepreneurship, read them, and started thinking about becoming an entrepreneur.
Alex persuaded two friends to start a company in 1991. (Let me remind you that this was very, very early in the transition in Russia from Communism to Democracy). They built accounting software which became a big hit. Alex rode the rising tide of entrepreneurship and launched several other companies. In 1995, he won a U.S. Information Agency “Business for Russia” contest. Part of the prize was an exchange program at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School. He came to the U.S. for 2 months, learned more about American business and went back home to solve some of our problems. (Like nearly all foreigners who come here, he fell in love with America and wanted to share the American Dream).
The flower, by runnerfrog (Cristian René)
Alex started researching why organizations struggle to scale well, why decision processes become more inefficient and why talented employees leave. Alex looked around at the natural world and noticed that biological organisms do a better job of scaling up. He designed a form of participatory organization based on evolutionary algorithms and prototyped it with a website that attracted hundreds of participants in 1998-99. His research was discovered by Prof. David Goldberg (University of Illinois), who invited the young Russian to join his lab. Dr. Goldberg’s lab was amongst the top in the field of evolutionary computation.
Alex expected he would have the best of both worlds by coming to America"”performing groundbreaking research and becoming an American-style entrepreneur. Once he got to Illinois, however, Alex realized that neither his academic research aspirations nor his entrepreneurial ambitions would be completely fulfilled. The university told Alex that he could not work outside the strict classification of his visa, could perform no side work, and definitely could not launch a company. “They even told me I couldn’t continue to run my website, since it had ad-generated income. I had to move it to Taiwan and have a friend over there run it for me,” Alex explains.
Since the focus of his research was forming companies using evolutionary computation, Alex realized he would not be able to take his theorems and try them out in the real world, as he had done in Russia. “I had to postpone all my entrepreneurial activities and resort to simulation and doing related evolutionary computation research for other professors, but that meant a big switch away from my main area of interest,” says Alex. Still, he managed to win a number of awards for his research.
In fact, Alex’s work did manage to stimulate entrepreneurial activity. Garrett Camp, who founded Stumbleupon, read Alex’s work and used parts of it in conceiving a social sharing company which ultimately sold to EBay for $75 million. If you take Camp at his word, Alex may have been modest in telling me this story. Says Camp, “Alex pioneered the concept of human-based computation. His work on human-based genetic algorithms provided a lot of insight during the design of StumbleUpon, and I referenced several of his papers in my Masters thesis”.
After Alex finished his Ph.D., he got an offer from StumbleUpon (ironically, a company that was founded in Canada in 2001 and later relocated to Silicon Valley). StumbleUpon uses human-based evolutionary computation techniques as does Wikipedia. Alex was clearly grateful for the offer. But it's pretty easy to tell that he is itching to start his own company, something he’s done successfully several times before in Russia in what might be considered a far harsher business environment. So what’s he doing right now? Waiting for his green card to be approved.
In the meantime, the unemployment rate in California is now over 12%, a near record high. The national rate is at 10%. Credit markets are totally frozen and small businesses"”the most dynamic part of the U.S. economy are suffocating for lack of operating capital. So slightly tweaking a law to allow smart foreigners to jumpstart our economy would seem to be a really easy decision politically and economically. Rather than listening to the emotion of misguided anti-immigrants, we need to listen to reason. After all, it is immigrants like Alex who have started 52% of Silicon Valley's tech companies in recent times.
Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
Nice story, anywayz.. love SU very much, it’s one of my fav social sites..
Can you write anything without using the xenophobe. You just keep singing the same tune with the same lyrics.
typical ego maniac Indian.. problem is that you can’t trust half of em just see what Arringto is going through with the Crunchpad. They fuck up their country and when it’s unbearable there because everyone is screwing over everyone else they come here… sure not all of them are like that.. but it would help if those that are not would help bring progress to their country rather than fleeing… then keep whining about immigration policies…
Fight bro fight, this is what the world needs
(Hmmm…) paâ??thetâ??ic: causing or evoking pity, sympathetic sadness, sorrow, etc.; pitiful; pitiable: a pathetic letter; miserably or contemptibly inadequate
Sarah.. wish you’d had to fire 10 high quality honest family man software engineers to be replaced by lying cheating faked CV Indian h1b1.. where after a week you realize that they are full of it. They needed training and simply sucked. They all pulled their CV’s out of their a$$, and in return the honest family men are on food stamps now. I am all for competition but h1b that just bring in tons of liars is wrong. And look around talk to people in that field they tell you that the majority of CVs of h1bs is faked.
So I’d rather miss the 1% of geniuses when I can keep honest people here. Just look at Arrington.. he’s the best example with his Crunchpad. It is engrained in their culture that lying on your CV is just part of the game…
Do we really want people like that…
Hey Vivek:
I would gladly support the Startup Visa if the H-1B visa were discontinued and all 3 million plus of the current H-1B holders were sent home. Until then — I have no interest in another one of your schemes to increase foreign labor in this country.
said the guy that can’t compete….
Well said….
If you xenophobes are bothered about fake cvs, then blame the inadequacy of your interviewing and orientation stuff in your companies that allow this to take place. Blame your ‘american’ boss who fires his employees so he gets other a bit cheaper.. ain’t that greediness? ain’t the world-toppling credit crunch and other ailments in the states because of the idioticism and greediness of ‘the real’ americans?? Reflect on yourself before blaming any specific group dude, and get a life.. Prof’s articles have always been controversial, because its the “reality check” that hurts us most. Empty vessels make more noise… Such a distraction from the real theme are you idiots..
First off, look at the replies. There are a lot of xenophobes.
Secondly, to everyone else, the “Startup Visa” isn’t the same as the H1 program – it’s not to let additional immigrants into the country to work at big companies.
The proposed startup visa would let people into the country if they secured funding from a VC for an ACTUAL startup that they’re working on. This is basically letting fledgling companies immigrate. None of these visa recipients would be taking an existing job. They would strictly be creating jobs. And VCs would screen them, so this would be hard to defraud.
I think it’s an excellent idea to get the most entrepreneurial of the citizens from the rest of the world. We definitely don’t have enough good entrepreneurs.
we are rightful to be xenophobes. look at how Arrington is treated with his CrunchPad. JooJoo? wtf? http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10410960-250.html
Professor, please don’t get discouraged by the racists and bigots who flood these comment sections with hatred. Most Americans are not like this. Most of us read articles but don’t post comments.
I also have some Indian friends who tell me that there are Indians who are very much like our bigots. They feel jealous that others like them have achieved success and have been left behind. I have noticed many comments from these people. This shows that they have caves in India also.
Thank you very much for your writing and speaking up for what is good and right.
Agreed. In my experience, the reflexive racists are a vocal minority, but one that is largely impervious to logical argument.
True. ALIPAC and other groups of aging, predominantly white racists actually organize to accomplish this very thing on comment threads. I would hope most can know about this, as their presence is not a realistic portrayal of anything except testament to the human ability to hold on to yesterday.
It’s very true…there are such xenophobic, bigoted, paranoid, hate-mongers dwelling in caves in India too. They make a lot of noise too especially in Internet forums where their faces cannot be seen. Listening to these people will only take us back to stone age.
Thankfully these people are a very small minority. If their numbers increase it will lead to social unrest, economic degradation, failure of law and order and eventually the collapse of the society.
But thankfully that doesnt happen easily as these people generally degenerate into the backgrounds because of their inability to look forward to the future. All they look at and talk about is the past and keep dreaming about returning to the past.
Yes…such people are all over the world and they dont truly represent any nation they belong to
So you love our country, you just hate the people in it
Isn’t that pretty much how home invasion robbers view our homes?
And we’re supposed to be flatrered?
I love how every 3rd world immigrant spewing anti-american hatred always has the statue of liberty photo at the top of the page
nice
Which part of the post is anti-American? Pointing out parts of the system that aren’t working and suggesting solutions to those certainly is very pro-American.
Australia is a third world country? Either you have no idea where Australia is, or you didn’t read the article past the word “immigrant” and turned on flame mode based purely on the writers name to see where he moved from before moving to America.
And you’re completely missed the point on the reasoning behind the statue (and putting photos of it in a post), it’s there to welcome immigrants, visitors and returning Americans to America. Yet visa policies these days don’t achieve the goals that were held when that statue was put in place and a (very, very) vocal minority seem to be dead set against holding up the beliefs behind that statue.
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