"To qualify for the rule, entrepreneurs would have to meet high standards. A foreigner must demonstrate that he or she will contribute to economic growth or job creation and show that a reputable investor has put at least $250,000 into the company. Under this rule, they can stay in the U.S. for 30 months, with the possibility of a 30-month extension. They cannot apply for a green card during this period."

This sounds like a pretty lame visa. How are you supposed to build a startup if you only have 30 months to do so? Why would investors risk $250k if the founder may be deported in 30 months? What happens after the extension period?

I'm 100% in favor of increasing all immigration to the USA, but this visa doesn't sound like a good option at all. Is the USA really so appealing that talented entrepreneurs will jump through this many hoops to start their company here?

This will be a deal-breaker for over 95% of the applicants. Even though the H1B Visa is a non-immigrant visa, there was no such clause attached to it like this one.

It's what enables 1000s of immigrants (like me) every year to first arrive on a non-immigrant visa and then get the employer to petition their green cards for permanent stay or eventually citizenship. I personally know many immigrants who didn't really want to become citizens and intended to go back to their home country in 5 to 10 years timeframe, but applied for and obtained permanent residency (green card) just so that this uncertainty of resident status is eliminated.

Take that (the green card) away, why would any entrepreneur be incentivized to apply for this Visa? Because 2 or 3 * years is a very short time frame to create and run a successful startup. Why would any entrepreneur risk coming here on a temporary stay only to be banished just as the startup takes off?

* 3 = Number of years Kevin O'Leary (Shark Tank) says you give your startup to turn profitable before taking it to the back of the Barn and shooting it.

We might actually have to start investing equally in US children of all socioeconomic classes to ensure we have enough entrepreneurs and bright minds to compete in the global economy.

EDIT: WOW, didn't think such an obvious comment would be so controversial (points are swinging up and down cyclically).

Do ya'll think we are extremely efficient at turning potential into value from all of our current citizens? Do you NOT want to do anything but fail if Trump severely fucks up immigration and our economy?

Or does it hurt your feelings to think that everything you've achieved in life wasn't 100% through your own hard work?

I'm confused.

And this problem with our schools existed long before trump, and not to sound conspiritorial, but the both GOP and neoliberals like Hillary both seem to have interests in keeping public schools underperforming.

And it isn't a funding problem, either. We spend more per capita on education than most, if not all, other countries.

Median teacher salary in the US public schools = $57,200. And 50.4 million students attend public elementary and secondary schools combine. Teacher student ratio is nominally 16.1 so ~3.5k* per student. However, the total spending per student is actually ~$12.7k core and 15.5k w/ indirect support.

This gap covers support staff, buildings, equipment, trips, testing, etc but most other school systems do that stuff for far less money. https://www.oecd.org/edu/EAG2014-Indicator%20B1%20(eng).pdf has PPP numbers for this stuff. But, it assumes each country is using the same metrics.

*Note that's just salary benefits get complicated to calculate.

Especially when the system seems to be so ... dysfunctional. I don't know a single teacher who hasn't had to personally shell out money for school supplies for their students because their school ran out of paper or something else essential.

Update: I misunderstood Retric. Teacher salaries make up 22% of total education spending. I guess that's ... better?

The cost of buildings, the maintenance, insurance, water, electricity all add up very quickly. Associated staff costs aren't cheap either - many schools have a nurse on staff to deal with injuries and illness, for example. Counselors/psychologists help troubled students. Learning specialists help deal with certain problems - as an example, when I was in kindergarten I was sent to a speech therapist a couple of times a week. Teaching assistants help care for the more severely disabled - some of them basically have a dedicated assistant based on their disability.

Buses aren't cheap either, and in rural areas, you might need several smaller buses to get everyone to school in a reasonable amount of time.

Schools in more urban areas often have security guards, and most schools have put more money into physical security as well with the perceived rise in school shootings (not trying to start a debate as to whether or not this is happening).

Administrators and secretaries plan and organize everything that isn't directly related to teaching, handle some disciplinary issues, and interface with other government agencies, the school board, and the board of education at the state and sometimes even federal level.

Education is expensive, and you can't start cutting out pieces of this without very quickly impacting the students.

This honestly applies to many areas of government, not just education. However, for right wing propaganda, it serves as a convenient boogy man to ram through tax cuts for the wealthy.

Cops and school nurses may come out of the 'school' budget line item but they are very much health care and policing spending. If another country has that same nurse, but takes it out of their public healthcare budget then their 'education' spending numbers will be significantly lower without lowering their total government spending.

Similarly if free universal healthcare is part of the national budget then the reported costs for every worker in the school system will be several hundred a month lower. Even though government spending is similar.

Not sure if anyone does this. But, another example is school buses could just as easily come out of the public transit expenses as the school budget. The distinction is rather arbitrary as you are moving people even if you are taking them to school.

PS: Net result we might be spending more or less money because your comparing relatively arbitrary budget numbers across different systems. Much like the US taking the prison budget to cover for the lack of a well functioning healthcare system for the mentally ill.

So... have them take the regular buses? Seems incredibly wasteful to try to fill one bus with school children when those areas are (or should be!) covered by the regular bus routes.

> Schools in more urban areas often have security guards, and most schools have put more money into physical security as well with the perceived rise in school shootings (not trying to start a debate as to whether or not this is happening).

WTF?

Regarding security, I can use the high school I went to as an example. When I went there, it was a very open campus, and fences were only used around the athletics fields, and were more to stop balls from heading into the street. During expansions and renovations, however, they built additional buildings around the edges of campus to act as barriers, and added more fencing, leaving only about 3 entrances to the grounds that were more easily monitored. This was despite the fact that it was a very safe area with low crime. I personally don't like it, but I suppose it's an easy way for schools to show that they're trying to make it harder for things to happen.

I just mean there is a sliding scale where you can include a school nurse as education spending or healthcare spending and countries don't always slice stuff the same way. Is reduced cost lunches welfare or education, how about subsidized school supplies?

Now, you might be ok with a broader geographical distribution of this type of talent, or argue that it will happen eventually no matter what. I hear you, on both counts. But, as a non-U.S. citizen, I am actually pretty surprised that the country would chose to forgo the advantage it enjoys by being a preferred immigration destination for so many skilled people...

It also seems to be done due to nothing but rank xenophobia. I mean, what is the excuse here? "They are stealing our jobs!"? This is literally a visa where the requirement is to create jobs for American citizens, and most of these tech firms will do so by exporting goods mostly to foreign markets (the market for most tech startups is not over 50% local to the U.S.) and/or creating local technology and expertise. Hell, once profitable, you can and should tax these companies to help provide for that very same education you want for American citizens! As well as UBI for those whose jobs are being displaced by automation. Startup visas are as win-win as it possibly gets.

Final point: The party and particular administration that seems to be most against immigration also seems to be the one most against science or robust public education. The foreseeable end result is grim, even if these policies last only 4 years: a "lost half-decade" in which the best domestic talent is under-nourished and the best foreign talent goes elsewhere.

There is only a small subset that seems to just be bigoted. And, yes, they do exist. I am pretty sure they are low in number. Most of the complaints are about things like body shops but there have even been complaints involving Disney.

Maybe I'm wrong, but if you can train your replacement, we probably didn't need a replacement. It's not like they move them up the ladder. They lay them off and pay the people with visas very little money, comparatively.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think, if true, they have a legitimate complaint. Most of them seem to agree that it should be bringing in experts and not lower paid people that need to be trained by the people they are replacing.

So, what do you think? Would you agree that there are legitimate concerns? Many of these complaints do not, to me, appear xenophobic or racist.

Better worker protections.

Stopping immigration doesn't stop you from having to train your replacement, they'll just be American instead. Making companies have to treat their workers with a bit of civility will solve a lot of problems.

In this specific case, and depth in the comment tree, there have been 2 incorrect assertions made, the clarification of which leads to the truth.

The first is - maybe now america will invest in its own talent

the second is - many times people are being told to train their own replacement

The issue is that job distribution is bi-modal in tech.

Theres a cluster at the very high end (jobs as a google scientist), and theres a cluster at the lower end (guys maintaining web pages).

The talent people compete for around the world is for the top end of the curve - and america has been sucking these people away from their home country for ages.

Furthermore - I have seen American talent in American colleges, you do a very good job of converting people into smart people.

This process has only recently been corrupted because of the poor job scenario for the lower and middle ends of the job curve. But its still damn good.

Closing those doors, after the rank xenophobia being displayed by the Administration means you lose out on the part of the curve you want to be competitive on.

To be clear, I'm not sure my question even really has an answer. I understand the need to attract top talent. If we don't, they are just going to go to work somewhere else.

At the same time, do we really want to replace local talent with not as talented, but less expensive, people? There are some big implications there and I have seen reasoned arguments to support doing so. It hits very strongly on the concept of what duties the government has to its citizens and to the rest of humanity who are not citizens.

I really don't know. I don't have a solution. I can do your math homework, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to realistically determine the answers to these questions.

I suspect that nobody would listen, even if I did have the answers. Ah well...

This is a false dichotomy. These people could be just as skilled, if not more. So then your only argument is localism.

Also, if we _let immigrants compete in the labor market properly_ by not handcuffing people like H-1Bs to their company.... they won't be cheaper. They could just get poached by another company or take a job at market rates.

1) This is a particular case where making immigration difficult to the people involved directly results in less jobs for Americans, as observed above. Yet that's still what is being done. It is clear from it that, for some people, the desire to reduce immigration is not just related to job security. This doesn't mean there aren't legitimate concerns, just that it doesn't seem to me that the explicit legitimate concerns are the only issue here.

2) The particular cohort of H1-B developers I am more familiar with compete with American grads for equal jobs and equal salary/RSUs, and are nobody's 'cheaper replacement'. Now, I am not saying that what you describe doesn't happen. But you know what would help there? Making it easier for people in H1-B's to change employers or even stay unemployed (even on their own money, without benefits) for a few months in the U.S. searching for a job if their employer is exploitative!

There is a sort of issue 2.1. here that I will acknowledge: yes, having more skilled people come in increases supply and lowers prices for labor, slightly. But most of the jobs in question are at companies that target a global market, this means not making use of a global labor pool is both ideologically suspect and a bad long term plan. Talented people in other places will still compete with you, and now you don't even get their taxes or the effect their talent creates in the available job opportunities in your area. If, say, you keep all the Amazon jobs for Americans but end up buying all your stuff from Alibaba the world over, was that a good outcome for you?

> > This is literally a visa where the requirement is to create jobs for American citizens

is this?

> The complaints that I read are often that they aren't actually jobs that couldn't be fulfilled here, with local talent

I don't expect that to change in any meaningful way. I would say there are no reasons to expect any different. I'd not be surprised to see Company X 'invest' a certain amount in someone just to get a cheaper person here and then get their investment money back, probably with interest, while paying the imported labor very poorly.

Hell, it'd probably be even less expensive because said company will just use said startup as a contractor. I have no reason to suspect they will doing any additional oversight or enforcement.

If your fear is being replaced by someone who is ready to work for less. There are enough kids who will do anything for a job, including taking a good pay cut. To replace you.

The real issue you must be worried about being relevant to the work you are doing. Being productive, resourceful and keeping your skills up to date. And yes never putting yourself in a situation where you think some particular work is beneath your station.

However, I would suggest that we have a moral obligation to avoid sinking as low as we possibly can. Yes, if people are hungry, they will work for pennies on the dollar.

Ethically, I would suggest we avoid desperate people en masse, for a whole mess of reasons. Hell, I can make a financial argument that suggests we not do that. You get better work from content people who have the means to consume.

I guess it's more a thought exercise. It's probably up to us, as individuals, to do the right things. We don't really have much history of doing so, collectively. Buggered if I have the answers.

But in talking of these, I see it more akin to the way Open Source software is up front and public about it - with the idea that enough eyeballs, these problems can be worked with. Being able to even frame the question, with politically charged areas like this, is a step in the right direction.

And no single person is expected to figure it out. But a thousand of us could.

The problems we have in America are the same if not much worse in most of the world (except for Europe, I imagine). What % of children in China and India do not have access to decent education or opportunities? I think it's pretty high.

My thought process was inspired by the recent article on the estimated 5 million geniuses in India, most of which will go on to lead lives in poverty.

The 5 million number is vastly exaggerated if you go for a real meaning of the word 'genius'. For example, Einstein's IQ is reportedly 160 and assuming normal distribution that is about 1 in 32,000. Even if everyone in India receives the same opportunities as Einstein did from their childhood, the number would be 1.34 billion/32,000 = 42,000.

Not to mention that IQ alone is far from adequate. Imagination, persistence, and courage are required for intellectual distinction. That's why there are so few accomplished geniuses in the world.

No. Or rather we are doing it badly. But we don't do any better if we geographically segregate people who otherwise might want to work together. It is an orthogonal (albeit incredibly important) problem. As I said, all of our countries should be investing more in education, in addition to having humane and sensible immigration policies and a reasonable social safety net. But in any case, there are more skilled people in the whole world right now than in the U.S. alone, by construction...

but it seems like the us has it made right now, a substantial amount of talent from overseas and abysmal investment in the native populace.

if you want to keep underinvesting in education, and keep a strong presence in new technologies/science/commerce...why would you turn off the magic spigot?

even if you started trying to right the ship of education, there's no way you could compensate for the talent thats coming in across the border, particularly in the short term.

Yes, that's absolutely true. I'm not much of an expert in that policy area, although it does seem the Bureau of Indian Affairs isn't working out well in some ways.

There's a lot of implicit assumptions in your original comment, and immigration policy is a politically extremely loaded subject, so people are almost inevitably going to project additional inferences onto your remarks inssofar as they seem to resemble well-known political arguments.

Who is we?

The E2 visa is a non immigration visa and you must demonstrate your intent to not immigrate to the United States. Given this, the non immigration tenet of this startup visa is a non-issue.

Except you have 20% chance of getting the H1B when applying.

There are numerous countries that fit this profile. The majority of Central/Eastern Europe, few Asian and South American countries, even with Africa having some. Instead, they expect for people from developed countries go through the nightmare of getting a visa, being screened and then live in places like Cali where cost of living is ridiculous. US could easily give out 1 Mil easy-to-get visas with easy-to-get transition program to a green card that would bump their economy, instead, they are creating walls everywhere.

To me, it seems obvious that every financially successful (through merit or otherwise) and well educated person you can draw into your country, the better. If such a person makes your country home, the likely-hood of them contributing to the economy is high.

Despite this, emigrating to the US from Western Europe is extremely arduous. Either you are transferred via a multinational facing high competition for the place or you enter the lottery alongside others who won't necessarily contribute as much as you are able to.

The incentive for a nation such as the US seems perfectly apparent from the outside. Grab the best and brightest from countries with excellent education and similar cultural backgrounds in exchange for citizenship. When there is so much demand, why not? Seems to only be a win.

I cannot help but think that western nations have entered some sort of pact (as many SV companies did) in regards to non poaching. Each country wants to keep their best, so some agreement (formal or otherwise) is reached to prevent mass exodus to one.

The left wants to maximize multiculturalism. This has become a sort of fundamental value to that tribe (rather than a means to an end), and their fundamental anti-value is racism/xenophobia/intolerance of anyone not white-Christian. So that tribe will resist any hint of an attempt to selectively immigrating people from culturally or racially similar countries, because such immigration actually threatens to reduce multiculturalism, which to them is a fundamentally evil thing. So they'd call it racist.

In addition, even just choosing people for wealth or intelligence or English skills, you'd end up with a big cultural/racial skew towards white people (compared to the world population), so the left would call it racist for the same reasons.

Those on the right might be happy with such immigration, but it's too difficult of an argument to make and it's too easy for the left to call them racists if they suggest anything like it. So as a proxy, they tend to argue for reducing all immigration.

I must be missing a lot of the details but I think it's some sort of political compromise/deadlock like this.

You can reverse engineer the government's motivation by looking at the policies it seeks to introduce and asking​ your self what worldview would motivate such policies. There's a nice little ML project.

Democrats like all immigration, refuse to go ahead with high skill only immigration reform unless republican compromise

The end result is deadlock.

I'm a Democrat. I don't like all immigration. With some quibbles, I'm mostly behind long existing rules barring certain “bad people” from immigrating.

OTOH, I think hard caps are bad ways of dealing with the social costs of high quantities of immigration of people that aren't excluded, and it would be better to assess direct fees for people who wanted to immigrate beyond the caps (or without a preference category but who aren't personally barred for bad conduct, etc.) And it would be better, in existing preference categories with caps, to align allocation per-country with demand (or just abandon specific per-country allocations altogether and just a use a global limits) so we don't have a handful of countries with very long waits for legal immigration in various categories due to per country, rather than in-total, caps.

I also have issues with the priorities (both positive and negative) implicit in some bits of the existing structure of immigrant and non-immigrant visa categories, but that's kind of secondary.

Well, that will surely make america bigly again.

It's about supply and demand.

If you supply labor at X skill level, an influx of immigrants at X skill level (but not of Y or Z skill level) will reduce the buying power of your wages.

Taking it to real life - people tend to oppose immigration when they are at X skill level, and support it when they are at Y or Z skill level. It's raw self-interest often dressed up as altruism or principle.

You can see this understanding here whenever H1B is discussed - suddenly supply and demand becomes an obvious economic concept.

And often they're in they're twenties, meaning society didn't have to pay for the expensive first two decades of growing up. Basically a live is 8 decades, 4 decades of which are unproductive, and 4 decades are productive. If you get an immigrant, you get a 6 decades person that's unproductive for only 2 decades -- and some other society paid for those 2 other unproductive decades.

Median age for all Americans is 36.

Sources:

http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-...

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/chapter-5-u-s-foreign-...

And indeed, when you remove most of the population who are younger than twenty, the medium age of the group overall will increase.

Sheesh! Next thing you know you'll be asking to price petroleum in something other than USD or something!

As a French cofounder of a small startup: no. We are looking at making a structure in Canada in order to hunt US money. We assume that immigration in the US will be a nightmare and we have tons of other problems to solve. European funds and Chinese investors are also interested in our tech.

Actually, we should explore if US talents are not willing to move out, to France or Canada instead.

Why? What's wrong with the current level?

It's incredible what is happening. It's like watching a slow moving train wreck and there is nothing we can do to stop it. :/

I think it's possible to be a superpower and maintain America's identity while also having the population be as happy as that of Sweden's. That's how I view(ed) the country heading during the 2008-2016 years. Maybe I'm naive but I was seeing a lot of social issues change for the better. We were working towards gay rights. There were discussions around discrimination and racism. We were also bringing a lot more attention to the healthcare issues we have here. There's a trend around being healthy and educated. There was even talk about wages, work/life balance, and the cost of living. I figured things would improve as these discussions began to get louder and take up more of the country's focus.

My views are starting to get a lot more cynical nowadays. I wouldn't mind if the U.S. just turtled and gave up on the dream of being the best. Is it silly to want to be the best country on Earth? Do people from outside the U.S. share that same mentality or is it just some culturally-imposed ideal that the U.S. has?

I think the latter, the whole notion of "The Land of the Free" always feels more like aspirational marketing than something true, and real.

I'm from the UK, although these days I've moved to Finland for personal reasons. I'm proud of the UK, and proud to be from the UK, but at the same time we're a country that used to have an empire, and due to a variety of changes we lost it. Some of the things we did when gaining or maintaining that empire, were terrible, others were generally positive.

But either way I think the UK has largely given up on being a world-leader. In some fields they still have a big edge, in others they're falling behind. Either way I think it is fair to say there is no cohesive push for greatness, just different people/groups/fields individually doing what is best for them. (Which could be extrapolated to extremes, e.g. Brexit.)

That wasn't my impression at all. During that time, I lived and worked in Baltimore and Philly. The inner city poverty there was as bad as ever--indeed worse because those cities, like many parts of the country, are getting left behind in the "new economy." In my view, America has a culture problem, not a talent or technology problem. We're people who dish out life sentences for a string of non-capital crimes; in Germany (much less Sweden) the maximum for murder is 15 years. Our state and local mismanagement is more reminiscent of a third world country than a western democracy. Our local governments are insolvent, we're incapable of building infrastructure despite throwing tons of money at it. I just returned from visiting Tokyo. The trains there are so smooth and reliable that they were a revelation to me coming from D.C. Not only do we not have anything like that, I can't even picture how our incompetent governmental units would build something like that.

I'm sure I'm viewing things with rose colored glasses. Germany and Japan are significantly poorer countries than the US, after all. But they manage to get really basic aspects of their society right in a way the US seems culturally incapable of doing.

I think the best example was with gay marriage. I definitely saw how much opposition there was to that, but seeing a lot of the country get dragged into progress made me feel more hopeful. That's the feeling I had in general, about everything. "Here's where we have progress to make; we'll definitely drag along a good portion of the country into it, but we'll get there eventually." Now it seems like the trend is in the opposite direction, or that it'll take way longer than I thought to see any kind of real improvement. Even with the infrastructure you mentioned, it seems like there's a big push to keep things exactly as they are now.

Certainly wanting to be the "best" as defined by richest and strongest is limited to a tiny handful countries (Russia, US, China basically), but even Russia and China seem more willing to concede the many flaws in their county. Countries like Sweden on the other hand will happily concede that they'll never be the richest or strongest and so aim to be "best" along other dimensions like equality and social care. Then there are other countries again that would be more than happy to simply make into the next decade more or less in one piece.

The whole "We're number One!" attitude is pretty limited to the US (possibly because they're really the only country that could make a strong argument for actually being "number one").

I've never seen any observer come to that conclusion lately (other than those with transparent agendas). For an overall take considering all the data, not just one or two data points, consider Nate Silver's: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-making-...

> Perhaps the biggest change is that any chance of a Turkey joining the EU is dead. That seemed like a real possibility 5-8 years ago.

Erdogan's authoritarianism is a bit of a confounding factor here.

Do you think very high population density is more or less healthy for the individual? What about the effect on the environment?

What happens once the US has 1.4 billion people and global birth rates have stabilized so there is no one else to bring in?

Maintaining economic growth may be important but it is only one consideration. Bringing in the best foreign workers is a somewhat easy and temporary fix, which dissuades the US from investing in its own citizens.

How many citizens who are down and out would actually be able to contribute a whole lot more? Is the onus solely on them to compete with already educated foreigners?

It would be more less selfish and more sustainable to concentrate on nurturing a national culture of intellect, learning, creativity, entrepreneurship and cohesion within the US rather than supplementing our deficiencies with the best of other countries.

Usually negligible because we have data only for developing countries. There's still no case of a developed nation with 1b+ population.

1. China is of comparable size to the US and has a population of nearly 1.4 billion people [ OK ]

2. Wee need the best here if we plan on staying a global superpower [ Huh? What does this have to do with territory size and population? ]

3. It's like watching a slow moving train wreck and there is nothing we can do to stop it. :/ [ How does this follow from any of the above ? ]

To make an actual point, China is vastly over-populated, to the point that it had to take draconian popuation-control measures. The result of those measures is now that each generation must care for itself and the previous generations, each of which are roughly twice as populous.

China is a slow-moving train wreck that can't be stopped...

1. People contribute to the economy. More people means the economy grows faster.

2. Lots of people would come to USA if it was easier for them to do so.

Of course if you are China or other USA competitor, you want low USA immigration, so that people stay in your country, and grow your economy instead.

2. Hopefully (1) does

India and China really need to get a handle on their burgeoning population.

Presumably, the investor has invested in a corporate entity organized in the United States and that the money has been used to pay employees such that there's some kind of structure that continues to exist in the U.S. with or without the founder. If you're the investor, and you're just writing a check to a guy who flew in with a startup visa and nothing else, then I, a U.S. Citizen, have quite a few startup ideas I'd like to discuss with you.

This statement's only value is political, and is irrelevant when it comes to the issue being discussed.

The French tech visa programme remedies the problems with US tech visa that the OP listed, raising the possibility that Macron at least understands the role of government in innovation and technology conducive to attracting talent.

Trump is simply clueless and willingly so about these matters, even when surrounded by advisers. Yet mentioning this is "political" (euphemism for "I'm offended").

Problem is, it's hard enough finding someone to hold my hand in NZ, let alone marriage in another country.

I had high hopes that Clinton would win and I'd have my dream realised. I guess, it was never meant to be.

The original proposal of the rule required 375k of funding from US only accredited investors, and there are also requirements for the startup founders to maintain a certain threshold of ownership while being able to hire a lot of American employees in short period of time. I don't remember the specific number requirement/head counts but it was definitely enough to pressurize the company to expand in size quickly, while many tech startups do not necessarily need to hire dozens of employees in a 1-3 year period, not to mention they all had to be US citizens. 1-3 years would also be a stretch for most startup to figure out a concrete plan of growth in order to quality for an extension. And what if the founders want to bootstrap themselves?

Ultimately this rule still doesn't show any concrete pathway of residency or visa guarantees after 6 years. And because it is not a visa, it will take time to educate immigration officers and TSAs as well as creating a reasonable structure to allow founders to travel outside US legally as well. Historically there is a huge delay of understanding OPT, STEM and O1 visas in plenty of US embassies.

To make things even more complicated, it is not USCIS's interest to be a judge to tell which company would qualify for this rule, and they would need to form a group of trusted committees to check case by case if a company and their founders/co-founders qualify for this rule. I also heard that founder's spouses would be able to travel to US too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12931943

This is a solid reminder that the Trump administration is showing itself to be mostly concerned with undoing anything that Obama did, rather than working for anyone's benefit. You can't apply logic to predict the actions of these people.

This is a big population of severely disadvantaged people who gain nothing from GDP growth. They do matter.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/16/93450/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...

Regardless, whatever the problem is, their solution is always lowering taxes on corporations and rich people. Whether the economy is doing poorly or well, that is what they will propose.

It is unsurprising what has happened.

The travel ban made it clear that's not the case (it affected legal immigrants).

In fact, Bannon had spoken against legal immigration before the election, and continues to do so:

"Legal immigration is the real problem"

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/2/14472404/st...

Second, there wouldn't be so many H1B applicants if there were other ways into the US.

A serious question: what would the president have to do, within reason, for you to consider him petty, childish, or incompetent?

>videos of him pushing others aside for photo ops

Check it out. The Montenegro PM stepped on Trumps foot, both of them react to that.

Ask yourself, What other information have you received in a biased form?

(and where are you getting this foot information from, anyway?)

The White House denies it, so who knows. Either way, there are many example's of him acting like a child. The inauguration debate for example.

The only special election they should be disappointed about is georgia 6th. Many of the rest have been fairly encouraging, given that they have been competitive in red districts.

I am pretty sure those people exist. I apologize on behalf of America and ask that you not blame me. ;-)

I'd be more disappointed about SC-05, where it was a close finish with little resources dedicated. If some of the GA-06 millions had been spent there, it might've been a win.

I wouldn't be at all disappointed with the fact that both districts went Trump by 20 points, and were quite close less than a year later.

I live in Seattle and I'm about ready to drive two hours north for my next startup. To hire the Russian programmers I'm already working with, or the folks on Kaggle I'd love to hire. The US has a completely broken scheme for visas.

Here's an analysis of residential rental prices: http://quantitativerhetoric.com/monthly-rental-report-may-20...

Those who can go back and forth and take meetings on both sides. People are within commuting distance of these large metro areas.

Seriously, our affordability problem is pretty much at crisis levels. People who argue that we should increase density aren't wrong, but we're already building towers as fast as we can. And the majority of those suffer from substandard, shoddy construction. We call it 'leaky condo syndrome'. And even those are selling for $750k+ for under 500sqft.

But go see San Francisco if you want to understand an affordability crisis. Vancouver is reasonable in comparison.

Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE a stronger tech sector here (especially as a developer). We desperately need an industry other than real estate and film. But I just don't see how that can happen without a fundamental shift that just isn't happening anytime soon.

And it doesn't stop there. West Van is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Canada.

Realistically, density doesn't seem to ever drive down housing prices in the long term. All it does is increase the value of land tremendously, and thus push local home ownership out of reach of everyone but the ultra-wealthy.

If you then refuse to build up, it makes the affordability much, much worse.

How? If you've balanced jobs/wages against housing supply via standard planning practices, then you should be able to tweak demand.

If demand is still high, density just drives prices higher, and shifts the entire housing economy to a rent-seeking one.

Furthermore, the real-estate market is global, but the housing market is local. My parents own homes in another state that they've never even seen, and merely rent out via a property management company.

As land prices get driven up through density, how do people participating in the local housing market compete with those in the real estate market?

This video tour takes you through a $980k USD condo in downtown Vancouver:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j3SChqp51Y

Please note that the shoddy construction is not an outlier, it's normal in Vancouver.

Whereas this much nicer condo in downtown Seattle a 5 minute walk from Pike Place Market is a relative bargain at $810k USD:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1519-3rd-Ave-APT-204-Seat...

french gets you lots of points, but as i recall even modest savings and a college degree got you most of the way there.

The Canadian visa system for skilled workers is so much simpler than the USA I almost couldn't believe it. No quotas, entirely points based, your score is easy to calculate and the minimum number of points needed published at regular intervals, much more personal control and far fewer vexing employer sponsorship issues as is so frequently the case with US green cards. It's almost meritocratic...

The French requirement for permanent residency visas generally only applies in certain provinces as well, especially the eastern ones like Quebec. Not speaking French isn't an issue for visas to work in most major cities in Canada, including Vancouver, assuming you speak English, aren't ancient (age is a factor in scoring), have a reasonable degree and a small amount of savings.

When was the last time you checked (no sarcasm), and how did you check?

We typically require people to prove that the job they're going to do can not be feasibly offered to a citizen. Typically exemptions can apply if you're applying for a work visa for a transfer within a multinational company, and for a small number of other more niche roles. In order to be exempt as a professional you need to be a citizen of Mexico or the U.S. and provably belong to a profession which is specifically exempted (there are a bit over 60) according to a list.

If you're actually building a business (rather than a get-rich-quick startup) people will welcome you with open arms. You'll find good QOL and great livability here. Though we are just starting to get traffic problems.

The only questions you should be asking are "are they decent people? Are they willing to integrate? Will they contribute to our economy? Will they make us problems?" And none of these questions you can answer by reading the name of the country on their passport.

Contrast that to somewhere like the US where there are many very game-able methods of entry, like the utterly shambolic H1-B visa.

Sure, that results in immigrants being more qualified and having more earning potential than the average native citizen. Nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, it means each immigrant will in average increase the country's GDP/capita. It also means the working class will be less likely to oppose immigration.

Where are you from? In middle-income developing countries (Brazil, India, China, Mexico, etc), educated, middle-class people typically earn well over $1000 per month. People who earn $200 per month usually don't fulfill the other requirements in the first place.

Because nationality does matter. The oft-repeated meme that we're all the same doesn't hold to even superficial scrutiny.

Nationality is not arbitrary in the sense that it's a crystallization of centuries of cultural values. People's place of birth predicts their attitudes about a vast number of political and social subjects. This includes, for instance, how they feel about such subjects as:

- democracy

- freedom of religion

- minority & women's rights

- the belief (or not) that certain races are superior to others

- etc...

(Apologies for the multiple edits. It took me a few tries to express myself clearly.)

If Elon Musk was born in India or China, and when he was 1 yr old he moved back to South Africa, and rest of his life remained unchanged from what has been, then he'd not be granted a permanent residency as easily and may have just become a US Citizen in the last two years. Can you imagine what loss it would be to the US if Musk had to wait so long to become a US Citizen?

Likewise, if a China-born French citizen were to apply for employment based permanent residency in the US, the green card backlogs would be too onerous for one to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Also, place of birth limits currently is used purely for limiting the number of immigrants born in a country gaining Permanent Residency in the US. So, a person born in a country like India (world largest democracy, with freedom of religion, minority and women's rights and equality in races etc) has to be in a much longer queue to get Permanent Residency than a person who is born in say Sudan or Iran or Pakistan or any of the other Islamic nations where there's no legit democracy or freedom of religion or minority rights.

Hope this helps in understanding the earlier comment in context.

For the purposes of this discussion, it's largely a distinction without a difference.

I don't oppose immigration in principle, but the rather extreme view that any amount of immigration, from any place, to any place is necessarily a Good Thing is founded on some very strange assumptions.

Yeah. Ask some KKK members what do they think about minority rights.

You can no longer apply for or extend Tier 1 (General) visas."

As far as I remember, this type of visa is abolished many years ago.

[In a Beijing ballroom, Kushner family pushes $500,000 ‘investor visa’ to wealthy Chinese] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-a-beijing-ballroom-k...

In the long run, this line of policies would of course lead to technological slow down and give a big opening for other countries to take the lead in a crucial determiner of economic successes.

Other possible theses may be that they favor the 'native whites' to have control as Steve Bannon used to mention or try to undo the legacies of Obama.

"If you're rich and willing to spend, we want you. If you're average or poor, fuck you."

Sympathy is dead to governments and most businesses. Especially with the nationalist opinion gaining popularity recently, I would expect sympathy for the fellow human if they're from a different country to die down even more.

Oh please. You don't know your history then.

We also refused Irish during the Potato Famine. This time it was because they weren't "healthy" - aka, no damn Mics.

After a campaign of anti-Irish sentiment, the Italians came here. We have a racial slur for them - fops. They were turned out en masse.

We denied the Jews coming here in '36. Didn't like Jewish - they kill and eat children! (Yes, this is in the US National Holocaust Museum as example of propaganda.)

We denied the Jews again in '46, AFTER knowing the atrocities they suffered in Europe. You know, those damned Jews.

In the 50's, we laid heavily into the Slavic and Baltic countries... Those damned Commies. Oh you were leaving because of humanitarian crisis? LIAR.

That's just a few examples. This whole Muslim ban has been done before with nations, politics, and religion (Irish, Communist/Socialist, Jewish respectively). Most populist "leaders" will garner support by singling one group out and attacking. Just like Hitler did, and following in the footsteps, Trump.

When I was a kid we used to cross the river into Mexico to go eat (on hunting trips near the border). We'd pay a guy to row us across and then back. It was a well known thing. People from both sides used it to go back and forth all the time.

Guess what, now that guy in a row boat is an official US border patrol checkpoint. LOL

The border is a big joke.

I doubt it. If you really wanted to deny border crossing, you'd have to allocate so much money to ICE that it would upend the federdal spending budget. It isn't feasible easily. That would make the current administration look stupider that it already is.

Good and Bad are definitely subjective. Illegal immigration is good for the illegal immigrant because they have better quality of life. Millions of Americans who voted for Trump seem to think it is bad. So it is definitely about perspective, and the reason we bother to make labels is because we live in a civil society where we follow rules, no matter if some people don't feel it is necessary.

What kind of mental gymnastics are you doing. I am asking you, do you support illegal immigration, it's a yes or no question.

As to the blockchain and ICO model, the problem is the current lack of regulation, leaving the burden of research to the buyer. I expect this will change relatively soon (places like New York, India and Singapore are already trying to introduce legislation regarding this) and then we might see more of an uptick, but you still need to get people out of the almost 40 year old mindset now that "Silicon Valley is where startups have to be to make it big".

Not an easy task I'd say.

And the US has a few cities with many such investors, which makes it easier to reach many in a short duration.

How easy or challenging is it to stay in Toronto or Vancouver and run a US-registered startup there, if you need to collaborate with others in either SF Bay area or Boston/NYC? (In-person meetings might not need to be frequent; geting together once a month could be sufficient.)

I am an entrepreneur from Asia working to build a fundamental technology and was planning to set up a company and live in the Bay area. After studying diligently about various options, Canada could in fact be a better place to settle in with a proper startup visa and much fewer hoops to jump through, however the attraction of US tech ecosystem is powerful.

(Note: I earned a Masters degree with a thesis on AI/ML from a major US research university and have traveled to, attended conferences, and lived in the Bay area for several months per year over the last three years.)

The major reasons for SF Bay area dominance include:

1) access to top people, many if not most were/are foreign students, who attend UC Berkeley and Stanford,

2) ecosystems of global tech talents recruited by major tech powerhouses like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.,

3) deep expertise and risk-taking attitude of Bay area VCs and angel investors, and

4) ease of access to vast US consumer and enterprise markets.

For 3) would major VCs or angel investors invest in a startup with offices about 1.5 to 2.5 hours away by plane? (The founders would need to travel to see them sometimes; but do they require in-person supervision/updates more than say once a month?)

For 4) I assume if the company is US-registered, it shouldn't have a problem in principle, is that true?

Essentially, the way I see it is : The US still has an edge in technology and are able to attract top talent from overseas because they still benefit from cultural hegemony and their image worldwide. What happens when the dream evaporates is still a mystery to me. For example, how will the situation evolve once chinese / russian / indian universities catch up with institutions like stanford / MIT etc and enough investors from these countries decide to pour money into local startups ?

Also, UK does not have a constitution and civil rights (e.g. right to privacy, to unrestricted, unfiltered Internet access) are being torn down further each day... so if I were an investor, no way I'd set foot in this country, much less invest in it.

The rest of the US can mine coal, frack, or whatever they want to do. They think that's where the jobs are.

Doesn't matter to us. We'll just speed up the electric, self-driving, car revolution with China and continue working on climate change rules and a global economy with Europe.

A sizeable portion of HN users are technical middle class citizens and seem on the face of it often highly separated from the working class, who they mine the metals for their self-driving car batteries and fold their $12 burrito, and drive their Ubers (for now).

Having said that a lot of HN is very modest and objective, so you bad sorts like parent comment and good sorts...like anywhere.

/rant

Another thing is, living on a boat, even if it's huge, is very boring.

I'm not sure that it's necessarily a bad idea; someone with vision and money may be able to contribute a lot to the economy. But handing them a visa for cash and a couple of years of supplying jobs feels very transactional. It says, "you can come here as long as you earn lots of money," not, "you can come here as long as you contribute lots to the economy."

What exactly is big problem with this?

Not speaking about becoming tax-resident of Monaco or similar, but your example or an EU country where you can open LLC and set up your own business and sort out residency paperwork in couple of years, for about that sum (5-figure USD/EUR) at the end benefits to the country budget and society.

Speaking from personal experience, and let me tell you we make sure we perform 100% of what government expects from us and pay everything that's due.

Also, in case of IT and startups, I feel it creates "cleaner" work environment and more positive and prospective work force than some other businesses (real-estate, natural resources, etc.)

Could you then go on to actually run a small business, out of a garage/workshop somewhere less expensive/in danger of incineration than Seoul, like Busan or Jeonju or Gwangju? It's kind of expensive to live in the US, and they have all these regulations and crap around some useful chemicals like hypophosphorous acid.

For example, UK has "Tier 1 - Entrepreneur Visa" where you can remain and run a company for 5 years. After 5 years, you can apply for extension for another 5 years or apply for settlement.

There is also UK "Tier 1 - Exceptional Talent" visa where you can apply to remain and work in UK without requiring any sponsorship from companies unlike H1B visa in US which requires company sponsorship.

Within 12-20 years, China's real GDP will overtake the US, assuming that China's GDP grows at an annual rate 2.5+% faster than the US for the period. This is quite plausible given that the current per capita income of China is only 1/7 of the US and its major focus on R&D. Even now, many of the best Chinese graduates from US universities are returning to China to pursue better opportunities there.

China is spending $409 billion (PPP) on R&D, the second highest in the world after the US and ahead of the EU. This amounts to 2.1% of GDP and very high for their stage of economic development [1]. Their goal, from a variety of sources, is to overtake the US as world's no. 1 and reclaim their historical place.

If you look at PISA, China and the rest of East Asia, together with Singapore, consistently perform at or near the top in math and science, and quite well at reading. Even the best performing US state, Massachusetts, is significantly below those in Math and Science [2].

Relatedly, China is catching up to the US in AI. [3] Most groundbreaking research is still conducted in the Western hemisphere, but East Asia is getting there despite much later starts. Also, many top researchers in Western labs are from East Asia, who may later decide to move back once the circumstances change.

Given the above factors, and only one-fourth the population (330 vs 1390 million), if/when the US cannot take advantage of best minds from these and other countries, would it be able to maintain the technological lead for long?

If the answer is no, how about the military and diplomatic dominance, which almost always follows economic and technological leads?

A possibility: If a larger portion of the GOP wakes up to the above, possibly within the next 10 years, they will start to actively recruit high-skilled immigrants, perhaps with some sort of point-based system as in Canada and Australia. Whether it would be too late or not remains to be seen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-ar...

"...The new immigrant entrepreneur parole program will create a yet another class of immigrants, albeit minority partners and working resources in the start-up entity, who will be beholden and entirely dependent on the hand-picked venture capital firms to maintain their status in United States in the parole period and beyond as immigrant entrepreneur will have no clear pathway to permanent residency. The proposed rule does not present a clear and fair system in which immigrants will have the same rights as U.S. workers or U.S. entrepreneurs in the marketplace. Therefore, the immigrant entrepreneur will have no leverage to negotiate the terms of the contract and relationship with and they will be susceptible to exploitation in a novel way as proposed in this regulation. Even if a path to U.S. permanent residency is proposed, it will in all likelihood, be at the expense of the current backlog of employment based immigrants in the permanent residency process.

In essence, the new immigrant would pay (in the form of hefty investment in the firm) for his or her travels to the United States only to remain in bondage relationship to the hand-picked VC firm. If this is not a definition of indentured servitude, then what is? Worse yet, the paroled immigrant has no defined wage requirement as a worker in the firm and has very lenient “income threshold” (400 percent of Federal Poverty Level for family size - irrespective of the prevailing wages of the entrepreneur’s job functions) as outlined in the proposed rule. It is well known that such system only increases the demand for new immigrants because of their lower leverage and bargaining power in such relationships, while the American workers and entrepreneurs are discriminated against in the talent ecosystem.

In justifying the rule, DHS presents “significant public benefit” such as entrepreneurship and job creation by immigrant founders. This reference to various studies is grossly misleading in that DHS uses contributions of immigrant founders without crediting the fact that most of these immigrant founders had gained sufficient certainty in their immigration process by obtaining a Green Card prior to making a significant investment in the companies they founded.

The H-1B and L-1B programs were also created under the pretext of “job creation and innovation in the United States” and 25 years after the inception of these programs, the American high-skilled workforce consists of an estimated 1.5 million high-skilled law-abiding immigrants who are captive to their employers and cannot start their businesses and create jobs. This is clearly detrimental to the prospects of our fellow American workers who compete against the captive workforce of skilled immigrants who are favored by bad employers for their lack of job mobility.

For the purpose of bringing in more immigrants from outside, DHS uses the disguise of “significant public benefit” only to pile up fresh immigrants in the Green Card backlogs in which the new immigrants have fewer rights (as will clearly be the case with the proposed class of Entrepreneur parolees). It is ironic that DHS did not use the same “significant public benefit” arguments for providing rights such as job mobility and ability to start their own companies by high skilled immigrants, who already have approved immigrant petitions (I-140), understand the business environment in US, have great ideas (and hold patents in many cases) and have investments to start their businesses. But somehow DHS and Administration is very selective in applying the same “significant public benefit” argument for NOT letting people with approved immigrant petitions to start their companies. This clearly raises doubts as to whether any economic argument by the DHS in the rule making process is trustworthy. The proposed regulation ensures that there will be absolutely zero “significant public benefit”. Instead, the proposed regulation is only designed for “significant benefit of hand-picked Venture Capitalists”...."

Complete comment: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwdh5aYDQTwIbGVkR2Z6LV9FVTA...

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