President Obama urged Congress today to work on immigration policy that would allow foreign-born startup founders to remain in the country. At the same time, several U.S. senators introduced a bill focusing on the same. As U.S. immigration policy is now computer programmers in the United States and educated engineers could be deported once school ended.
"At this point in one of these classrooms, there is a student struggling with how to turn their great idea - its Intel or Instagram - a great business," Obama said in a speech to Las Vegas today. "We give them all the skills they need to understand this, but we'll turn around and tell them to start the business and create jobs in China or India or Mexico or elsewhere. This is not how you develop new industries in America. Thus giving you new industries to our competitors. This is why we need comprehensive immigration reform. '
The President noted that Instagram was co-founded by an immigrant - Brazilian Michel Krieger who studied at Stanford University. But, he said, all the founders of startups are able to obtain a visa and stay in the NICU over Obama urges Congress to act now, a handful of U.S. senators - Orrin Hatch, R- Utah, Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Chris Coons, D-Del. - Introduced new legislation, the Immigration Act of Innovation 2013. This bill focuses on the reform of immigration laws in the country for highly skilled workers. The idea is to increase the ceiling of H-1B visas from 65,000 to 115,000, with the relaxation of rules green cards.
Several high-tech companies have come out in support of such a reform. Google, Intel and Hewlett Packard congratulated all the government's efforts to change immigration policy in the country today.
Google vice president of operations people, Laszlo Bock, wrote in a blog post today that immigrants founded 40 percent of companies in high-tech industry that went public in the United States, including Yahoo, eBay Intel and Google. And fourth start-ups have been created by an immigrant. Together, these companies employ about 560,000 workers and to $ 63 billion in sales.
"Our experience here in Google and in the technology sector we show that immigrants in the United States are a powerful force for entrepreneurship and innovation at all levels, from startups to multinationals," wrote Bock.
