Obama Administration Asks Silicon Valley How It Can Improve Immigration Process For Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, February 22 2012
Top officials from the White House and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are in Silicon Valley for the week to solicit viewpoints and input from the startup community on how the administration can improve the way it hands out visas to talented entrepreneurs who've landed funding to create new companies.
The USCIS Entrepreneurs In Residence Information Summit is scheduled to take place all day Wednesday at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Mountain View, California. Five people from the world of tech startups have already agreed to participate in the USCIS' three-month mostly pro-bono entrepreneurs in residence program. The USCIS has not made the names of those people public yet, but they'll be working with five staffers at the agency to improve the way it hands out visas to entrepreneurs who have landed funding.
This is the latest twist in the growth of a relationship between America's Internet-powered tech sector and the federal government.
USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas will be on hand to discuss immigration issues with more than 100 people from the startup community who have registered to attend the event. Also there to hash out the agenda for the entrepreneurs in residence will be Ping Fu, the president, co-founder and CEO of GeoMagic, a 3-D software visualization company; Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital; Shervin Pishevar, managing director at Menlo Ventures; and Vivek Wadhwa, a well-known academic who has conducted research into entrepreneurship and the role of immigrants in creating startups in the United States.
The goal of the event is to gather input so that the entrepreneurs in residence can come up with well-thought through ideas for making the process of applying for work visas more transparent and accessible to immigrant founders of new firms. Part of that will involve improving the training of the staff within the immigration department, wrote The White House' former Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Office of Science and Technology Policy's Senior Advisor Doug Rand in a blog post last December.
It might sound vague and bureaucratic, but for foreign entrepreneurs wanting to carry through with their plans to start up a company in the United States, the risk of being denied a visa based on a very narrow view of what a startup company should look like is very real.
Craig Montuori and Jonathan Nelson of Hackers and Founders have been working to push the issue of startup visas for some time, as have others in the technology and startup community. They recently collected dozens and dozens of stories of immigrant founders who have run into problems obtaining the visas, even though many of them have been funded by venture capitalists or have definite plans with other professionals to start companies.
In some cases visas have been denied despite the company having been funded because the startup can't demonstrate a viable revenue stream yet, said Montuori.
"The first key step we're pushing for is to establish some metrics by which these companies can be adjudicated," he said in an interview. "We've found that [the USCIS staff] have a very hard time interpreting these early stage companies."
Columnists like Tom Friedman and tech leaders like Bill Gates have long complained about U.S. immigration policy and its odd unfriendliness toward highly-skilled foreign workers who could be starting companies and creating jobs here, or bringing their skills to improve the talent pool at existing companies.
But comprehensive immigration reform legislation is stalled in congress as is specific bi-partisan legislation that attempts to address some of these startup visa issues. So the Obama administration is left trying to make the most of the rules that it currently has on the books by re-interpreting a more accommodating implementation of those rules with fresh information gathered from the field.
The USCIS is the second agency to experiment with the idea of the entrepreneurs in residence program. The Food and Drug Administration is also currently experimenting with the model, and the project deadline for that group of entrepreneurs in residence for coming up with a speedier approval process for new products is March 31st.