One issue to consider in this public policy issue, as in most public policy issues, is basic economics. "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." Entrepreneurs are a scarce resource from the point of view of countries. On the other hand, countries in which to start a thriving business are a scarce resource from the point of view of would-be entrepreneurs. Just HOW scarce a resource is, in terms of how much an offer of that resource will change human behavior, is measured by the resource's price, which is set by supply and demand.
There is a lot of demand for living and working in the United States. The United States enjoys net immigration with respect to almost all other countries in the world, and has throughout my lifetime. There are definitely other countries that value entrepreneurs and that offer prosperity, personal security, and freedom and democracy to would-be immigrants. But each time the issue of immigration policy comes up on Hacker News--and it comes up a lot--the dozens of comments make clear that many, many, many smart, diligent people would be glad to settle in the United States, if only they could, and so all the existing channels for legal immigration to the United States are well used. Many of those channels bring in founders of new thriving businesses.
So the policy issue to consider in United States politics, for an American voter like me who reads the interesting article kindly submitted here, or an article from today's local press,
is how much I think the United States is missing out on entrepreneurs who desire to immigrate to the United States soon rather than go to some other country. Surely such people exist. But surely (undeniably) each year the United States already enjoys large numbers of immigrants,
and many of the immigrants who arrive here start up businesses once they arrive. Perhaps the United States is already doing enough. It would be interesting to hear from readers here whether they have ever seriously considered settling in Singapore, Britain, New Zealand, or Chile under the currently offered policies in those countries.
AFTER EDIT: And I see (from net downvotes soon after posting) I'm already swimming against the usual tide here of most HN participants supporting the United States having an entrepreneur visa on easy terms: perhaps terms easy enough for them and for their friends to use. That's a legitimate opinion. I'm happy to learn from you. Please explain why you think that is a necessarily better policy for the United States than the current United States policy. Learning to persuade is part of political life here.
> Perhaps the United States is already doing enough.
Long-term it's absolutely not enough. The fundamental socioeconomic feature of 21st century will be the competition between the US system and China's massive population for global economic dominance.
The US population is ~300 million, China's is ~1.2 billion, 4x our size. For every engineer, scientist, genius, etc in the US, there are ~4 in China. Over the long term the US has no hope whatsoever of competing against that without significant structural changes.
Those structural changes include fixing our educational system, fighting tooth and nail for skilled immigrants, offering them better incentives to stay rather than return home to fast growing developing economies to make their fortunes, fixing the broken financial and patent/IP systems, etc.
Judge Posner sums up our shortfalls well in a recent blog post [1]. The US system will need to be operating at an order of magnitude greater efficiency than it currently is to have any hope of overcoming China's massive numbers advantage. Immigration is one of the few crucial advantages the US can exploit in that competition, but right now we're shooting ourselves in the foot so hard there we're blowing our leg off.
The more fundamental point is that assuming equally sound governance (a big assumption of course), the natural size of the Chinese economy is around 4x the natural size of the US economy.
Does that matter? Not really. "US" and "China" are ultimately just arbitrary labels.
Yes, that too of course. Though I'd argue that population alone is nothing, as China's 20th Century history demonstrates quite clearly.
It's a country's government and legal system, combined with its human resources (both aptitude and education), that dictate whether its population will be an asset or liability. Hence my focus on their human resources' massive numbers advantage
Haha, I actually tried to find that scene on Youtube to reference in my post, but couldn't. All of The Social Network breakup scenes on Youtube start after it. That was like, the most important part for the movie, ffs.
You don't need lots of geniuses - you can always import an Einstein or Fermi. What you are facing is a country where the best students become semi-conductor designers rather than lawyers or MBA.
The USA is in trouble when the smart 'ethnic' students can all get into law school/MBA programs instead of being forced into STEM.
It is not true that: "The United States enjoys net immigration with respect to almost all other countries in the world, and has throughout my lifetime."
First, those are two different metrics. I read him as saying that the United States has net-positive bilateral migration with almost all countries in the world; i.e. for any given country X, more people are emigrating X->USA than USA->X. That doesn't imply that the U.S. would necessarily be the #1 country in the world for overall immigrants-per-capita, only that it wins most pairwise comparisons of "voting with your feet".
Secondly, even by your metric, the U.S. is pretty high up. Of the 30 above it on that list, many are microstates, which makes per-capita statistics fairly wonky (some individual American cities would be that high, too, if they counted separately as microstates). And, many aren't even countries at all (e.g. French Guiana, or the Northern Mariana Islands... a 50,000-person U.S. territory). If we ignore those, then things look quite a bit different; the U.S. ends up #15 among independent non-microstates. And a lot of those are places you don't really want to move to if you have a choice, e.g. Burundi ranks highly because of regional wars and refugee camps. Among the US's peer group of non-micro developed nations, it's #6, behind Singapore, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and Portugal.
Top 5 out of 8 wouldn't be doing so well... but the point here is not about absolute numbers of people migrating, its about the types. Does the US want entrepreneurs or just those with family members?
I think the United States comes in for a bit more than its fair share of criticism around immigration, but that's partly because of the earned (and adopted) reputation as the worldwide centre of liberal thought and economics.
The very essence of the United States rests on both economic and migratory freedom, so issues that combine both (immigration of entrepreneurs) form a touchpoint that highlight the higher standards to which America is held.
A man offers you free envelopes, as many as you want to take.
Half the envelopes contain no money. Half of the other envelopes contain a one dollar bill. Half of the remaining contains a five dollar bill. The rest a ten dollar bill.
Some envelopes actually contain debt that you must pay.
Immigrants might create social pressure until they're fully integrated, some don't know the language, and some are more likely to commit crimes or cost the state money upon deportation procedures. In Switzerland, almost three out of four detainees nationwide are foreigners (citation: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss_news/Experts_reflect_on_sp... ).
I do think you can mitigate this by making people pull their own fees when the visa is granted, not only all the cost of the actual administrative procedures but also a median insurance fee for future detention and deportation costs broken down via a statistical model. But even then you have side-effects, like a sudden increase in San Francisco population, increased rents for housing, gentrification of neighborhoods ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification ), displacement of people that otherwise have lived their entire life in that area, and less opportunities for US nationals given the foreigner's competition.
Despite this, I still think that US should allow more immigrants, that the bar is currently set too high and that in the future we'll be able to make more progress towards the idealistic "Earth: one country one nation" slogan, but it's not as simple as taking all the envelopes.
Immigrants might create social pressure until they're fully integrated, some don't know the language, and some are more likely to commit crimes or cost the state money upon deportation procedures.
Surely that's the whole point of the immigration process, to weed out the applicants that fall into these categories... Canada and Australia both require you to prove English language ability (via IELTS test). Background check people's criminal past etc etc
I very much like Australia's immigration process, which requires independent verification of a person's skills, they have a specific skills shortage list (updated regularly) and you have to agree to respect Australia's culture and values. You want to live here then you adapt, not the other way round. I think this is the problem with too many places at the moment.
I think gentrification of neighbourhoods and displacement is happening regardless of the fact of immigration, it's the result of an aging population alongside the increase in population in general.
There's lots of space here. If letting lots of entrepreneurs in is likely to grow the economy/grow federal revenues/create jobs, what are the arguments for having more restrictive regulations?
Other countries won't reciprocate. Unless an American can freely go to India or China and start a business with no strings or interference, the opposite should not be allowed.
Further, anybody who wants in to the US will simply call themselves and 'entrepreneur' regardless of their skill, experience, and capital necessary to start a successful business. For instance if someone is dying because of substandard medical care in their own country and only wants treatment in a US emergency room they would just declare themselves an 'entrepreneur'.
I agree with your thoughts on reciprocal agreements, although UK -> US is not the same as the other way around, it is MUCH MUCH easier for a US citizen with skills to move here than a UK citizen to go to US. I looked into this a few years back and I would have to go H1B route which makes it almost impossible since I would have to find a job from the UK.
but agree with your sentiments that that's how it should work in an ideal and fair world.
Not sure if I was dying then I would want to rake up such a HUGE bill and move to US for medical treatment, unless I was super rich in which case this would never be an issue...
If you have a universe with two countries, A and B. A says it will take anyone from B provided they're in the top 10% of the population on some arbitrary metric. B says nobody can come because it's pissed off and feels Soviet. Over time the expected state is that A will accumulate more individuals ranking high on our arbitrary metric than B.
If our arbitrary metric is economic productivity, we can see that having a large population of Sergey Brins, Vinod Khoslas, etc. is beneficial to US citizens even if Americans may not have a tea party resettling in Russia or India.
The us already has such metrics. What the anonymous economist author is advocating is reducing these criteria at which point many people can simply buy their way into the country under the guise of being an entrepreneur.
Why should America wait for other countries to reciprocate? If other countries don't accept American entrepreneurs and America accepts their entrepreneurs, most entrepreneurs will come to America to do business, and only a few will take business elsewhere. Wouldn't that give America an economic advantage?
Because America is a country that should support its own citizens. Suppose some other country becomes the hotspot for start-ups in five years and locating a business there becomes necessary to succeed. Without requiring reciprocation, American policy will have severely damaged American entrepreneurs ability to compete with foreign entrepreneurs who can start a business both in their home country and in the US. American policy should not support foreign entrepreneurs substantially more than its US citizen entrepreneurs.
EDIT: if you think that the US government should support foreign entrepreneurs over US citizens you need to explain why instead of downvoting.
Supporting foreign entrepreneurs IS supporting US citizens. It's 100x easier to find a job as a foreigner (and ostensibly take a job away from an American) than it is to start a company in the US and EMPLOY Americans.
It the US wants to support US citizens, it would let more people start businesses. More businesses = more jobs.
"But surely (undeniably) each year the United States already enjoys large numbers of immigrants"
Agreed. I do not think that is the point of argument here. US overall has huge number of immigrants every year. The problem however is how they determine the eligibility. Family based permanent residency is much easier to get if your spouse is a US citizen no matter what your qualifications are. That is understood considering families need to be united. But why are the programs such as EB-5 investor visa so poorly designed ? If majority of those visas are going unused every year, why dont we instead try and correct it so that it makes it a little easier for aspiring foreign entrepreneurs to apply. Do we really need $1M to start a business these days ?
Do we really need $1M to start a business these days?
The EB-5 requires the investor to create or preserve 10 US citizen jobs within 2 years. Ballpark a median salary of $50K for each of those employees and double that number to account for non-salary costs of employing someone (employer paid taxes, healthcare, office space, etc).
There's a million dollars spent in the first year.
Creating jobs for 10 US citizens is a ridiculous requirement. Creating 1-2 jobs would be more reasonable.
Also US residency and citizenship is such not a wonderful asset. I for one would never want citizenship because it means that you now have to pay taxes on your worldwide income, even if you do not live in the US.
So if you earn $1000 per year and you live in a developing country, the right to live in the US is very valuable. If you earn $100k per year or higher the right to live in the US or to get US citizenship becomes a lot less interesting.
Since (1) US taxes are relatively low on high income earners (right now anyway) (2) you can usually use the US taxes you pay as a credit against any foreign taxes you owe, is this actually a big problem in practice? Perhaps if you are making a large income and currently reside in a country with very low taxes, I suppose.
There is a lot of demand for living and working in the United States. The United States enjoys net immigration with respect to almost all other countries in the world, and has throughout my lifetime. There are definitely other countries that value entrepreneurs and that offer prosperity, personal security, and freedom and democracy to would-be immigrants. But each time the issue of immigration policy comes up on Hacker News--and it comes up a lot--the dozens of comments make clear that many, many, many smart, diligent people would be glad to settle in the United States, if only they could, and so all the existing channels for legal immigration to the United States are well used. Many of those channels bring in founders of new thriving businesses.
So the policy issue to consider in United States politics, for an American voter like me who reads the interesting article kindly submitted here, or an article from today's local press,
http://www.minnpost.com/christian-science-monitor/2012/06/st...
is how much I think the United States is missing out on entrepreneurs who desire to immigrate to the United States soon rather than go to some other country. Surely such people exist. But surely (undeniably) each year the United States already enjoys large numbers of immigrants,
http://www.census.gov/population/foreign/
http://travel.state.gov/visa/immigrants/immigrants_1340.html
and many of the immigrants who arrive here start up businesses once they arrive. Perhaps the United States is already doing enough. It would be interesting to hear from readers here whether they have ever seriously considered settling in Singapore, Britain, New Zealand, or Chile under the currently offered policies in those countries.
AFTER EDIT: And I see (from net downvotes soon after posting) I'm already swimming against the usual tide here of most HN participants supporting the United States having an entrepreneur visa on easy terms: perhaps terms easy enough for them and for their friends to use. That's a legitimate opinion. I'm happy to learn from you. Please explain why you think that is a necessarily better policy for the United States than the current United States policy. Learning to persuade is part of political life here.