The Startup Visa Act of 2010
Late yesterday afternoon Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced a piece of legislation dubbed “The Startup Visa Act.” With support from over 100 US venture capital and angel investors (including top players Y Combinator and Foundry Group), The Startup Visa Act represents a step in the right direction towards proper immigration reform.
The Startup Visa Act of 2010 would create a two year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who are able to raise a minimum of $250,000, with $100,000 coming from a qualified U.S. angel or venture investor. After two years, if the immigrant entrepreneur is able to create five or more jobs (not including their children or spouse), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenues, he or she will become a legal resident.
Source: TechCrunch
The Startup Visa Act does not look to take American jobs from natural-born citizens and give them to immigrants. In fact, it does the exact opposite. The Startup Visa Act will create jobs by bringing to the US immigrants who are looking to resource their newly-funded ventures with American employees. If these businesses fail to provide positive growth to the economy after a two year trial period, their founders will have their Visas revoked at which point they will be forced to leave the country.
As it stands, the theory behind the bill is excellent: either the entrepreneur stays in his home country and creates jobs there OR he moves to the US and brings jobs here. The choice is obvious, however, there are still a few kinks that need to be worked out. For starters, what is to stop an accredited angel investor from financing his buddy’s business venture in order to guarantee him lifelong citizenship? Also, the bill disregards those startups that chose to bootstrap and not take on any additional investment. Hopefully all of these “issues” will get worked out before the bill is passed into law, which may in fact happen.
As Fred Wilson over at A VC writes, “0.1% of all legislative ideas get this far. So we should be proud … but about 1% of bills that get this far actually turn into laws. So we’ve got a lot more to do. We need everyone to contact their Senators and Representatives and explain why this is such an important issue.” I would suggest you head over to The Startup Visa’s homepage — http://startupvisa.com/ — if you would like to get involved and support the cause.
Check out the full bill embedded after the jump.
