Let Those Techies Stay

Among the insanity and inanity of the immigration problem and resulting debate in the US is the loss of good workers, and not just the folks who pick your lettuce. It's also the workers who helped the ignored folks in Louisiana reconstruct their houses and city after the hurricane. And most importantly it's the great minds we are educating at our Universities here and then send them off to other countries to compete with us.

As this recent Kauffman Foundation Study entitled "Intellectual Property, the immigration Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain" displays in great detail (and you can access the whole report for free in pdf format via the link) it's a big problem. Strikingly, due to our restrictive immigration policies, we are missing out not simply good workers, but talented entrepreneurs, as the web summary notes:

"The earlier studies, “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs” and “Entrepreneurship, Education and Immigration: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part II,” documented that one in four engineering and technology companies founded between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder. Researchers found that these companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006. Indian immigrants founded more companies than the next four groups (from the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan and Japan) combined.

Furthermore, these companies’ founders tended to be highly educated in science, technology, math and engineering-related disciplines, with 96 percent holding bachelor’s degrees and 75 percent holding master’s or PhD degrees."

We cannot afford to lose this force of entrepreneurs, whom to a great extent we have educated and propelled ahead, and must change our policies to invite more to stay. The future of our economy, to the great benefit of the world economy, and our country depends on it.