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Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

wsj.com

151–160 of 235 posts

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#151
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damned Australians.

Fun fact: the E-3 visa is basically an H1-B, but with a separate quota, for Australian citizens only. It was created by Bush to thank Australia for helping the US in the Iraq war.

Another key difference -with an E3 there's no path to a green card. A number of friends have had to change to L1/H1 visas because of this limitation.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not referring to H1Bs. http://goldsea.com/Text/index.php?id=6205 Sehat Sutardja. One of many such examples. All you needed to do was fly your pregnant wife over to get American citizenship...but that's changing now.

> All you needed to do was fly your pregnant wife over to get American citizenship...but that's changing now. This statement is steeped in such ignorance. You get absolutely no immigration benefit whatsoever by having a U.S. citizen child. If you are talking about a child's citizenship, then FYI, birthright citizenship (part of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution) has not been repealed .

That's untrue. The benefit is not immediate, but as soon as that child is 21 they are able to petition for immigration status for their parents for family reunification. In fact the majority of US imigration happens via family reunification.

http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/family-reunification

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#153
post #117

In a slightly older thread concerning this topic, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11306290 I made some objections to this analysis. I think there's a fundamental problem in how to interpret this analysis. It says that a company is founded by an immigrant if there is at least one immigrant founder. This means that if 1 of 10 founders is foreign born, then it classified as immigrant founded. An aggregate calcul…

I'm jaded. But stories like this are planned to divert to things like what IBM are doing or job shops like Tata,etc. "Oh look at what immigrants are contributing in entrepreneurial sense, but ignore how big companies are moving jobs overseas." IBM and Disney, iconic US brands are at the for front of outsourcing local jobs using H1B scabs as the route.

There's no reason to feel jaded. What you say is absolutely true. That's why these reports always come from think tanks, without peer review, and half-assed analyses, but dressed in the clothing of rigorous, critical scholarship.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#154
The arbitrary criteria for deciding what companies to include shows they could have just searched for one (valued at over $1B at 2016-01-01 and not publicly traded) that gives the most favorable result. Why $1B? Why not $10B, $100M, or $1 million? Why 2016? Why not 2015 or any time in the past decade or two? Why not listed companies? Is that so they can call them "startups", or is it because $1B+ listed companies are mostly founded by American born people?

I couldn't find any mention of their methodology for selecting criteria in the linked report. Without that, the only conclusion seems to be "water is wet". This doesn't look like science. It looks like politics and is inherent dishonesty.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All you needed to do was fly your pregnant wife over to get American citizenship...but that's changing now. This statement is steeped in such ignorance. You get absolutely no immigration benefit whatsoever by having a U.S. citizen child. If you are talking about a child's citizenship, then FYI, birthright citizenship (part of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution) has not been repealed .

That's untrue. The benefit is not immediate, but as soon as that child is 21 they are able to petition for immigration status for their parents for family reunification. In fact the majority of US imigration happens via family reunification. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/family-reunification

For this to work a would-be immigrant has to have a child on U.S. soil, wait 21 years, and then have their child sponsor them. That is not a practical immigration plan.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#156
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding me? You need to invest at least $500,000 for the EB-5. Most families don't have $500,000 to just invest in order to get their child a green card. A lot of international students I know worked part-time on-campus (permitted on the F-1 student visa) in order lessen the burden on their parents. Their families struggled to put together the money to pay for college in the U.S. I went to Stony Brook Univers…

I don't understand this reply at all; you said "that "wealthy upper class" can immigrate without obeying visa rules. That is ridiculous.", and your parent reply pointed out that it's not ridiculous, it's literally true.

I meant to say that he was wrong in characterizing immigrants students and entrepreneurs as coming from a "wealthy upper class". The majority of foreign students come from middle class families, many which probably struggle to pay US college tuition, and cannot afford a $500,000 investor visa.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#157
post #117

In a slightly older thread concerning this topic, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11306290 I made some objections to this analysis. I think there's a fundamental problem in how to interpret this analysis. It says that a company is founded by an immigrant if there is at least one immigrant founder. This means that if 1 of 10 founders is foreign born, then it classified as immigrant founded. An aggregate calcul…

I'm jaded. But stories like this are planned to divert to things like what IBM are doing or job shops like Tata,etc. "Oh look at what immigrants are contributing in entrepreneurial sense, but ignore how big companies are moving jobs overseas." IBM and Disney, iconic US brands are at the for front of outsourcing local jobs using H1B scabs as the route.

Right idea (being jaded) but wrong reason. It's more likely a political jab at the various GOP candidates' opinions about H1Bs.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#158
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe that adversity builds strength which leads to success, which I believe is your argument. I won't believe it until we start seeing the schools of the children of the successful put arbitrary and even petulant roadblocks in the way of the students, and deliberately teaching to far below the level the students can handle. Anecdotally speaking, as an American immigrant to Sweden, I do not think the adver…

Educated ambitious people of other countries move and work to somewhere where the opportunities are greater, and are willing to do so, leaving their home countries and families. This is a filter which causes these immigrants to be successful compared to the average disadvantaged unmotivated american. It's the old high vs low skill immigration debate.

I agree that it's nice to think that. However, you've now introduced a third axis. Axis #1, from the report, is that nationality diversity is important, in which case a white Protestant Canadian from Toronto brings more diversity than a Russian Orthodox Tlingit from rural Southeast Alaska.

Axis #2, from tonyhb, is that adversity leads to success. In which a highly educated medical doctor from Iraq who, as a refugee, ends up in Sweden and works as a taxi cab driver in order to support his family, instead of spending two years to learn the language and get recertified, has excellent changes for financial success. Or not.

Now your #3 is "Educated ambitious people". But you have two baselines: "somewhere where the opportunities are greater" than in the home country is one, "successful compared to the average disadvantaged unmotivated american" is another. These are not the same. The US brings in agricultural workers from Mexico. The opportunities are greater in the US. But they are less successful financially than 'disadvantaged unmotivated american', because the Mexican worker is going to return to Mexico, where the cost of living and retirement is lower, while the American will stay in the US so needs a higher pay.

Thus the long tradition of, say, South Africans going to work in London, suffer for a few years to save up a nest egg, and move back to South Africa. That doesn't mean the local English are disadvantaged and unmotivated, only that they have different motivations.

Or the educated ambitious doctor from Iraq who drives a taxi, because the opportunity to be alive driving a taxi is better than being dead back in Iraq. Two different baselines, yes?

Each of these three axes leads to different policy. All of them have some truth. All are based on factors which are hard to identify in a 22 year old other than "comes from a family with money."

Now to point out another worrisome aspect of your comment - why do you highlight 'average disadvantaged unmotivated american'? The report compares immigrants to founders of high tech companies. Very view people, including educated ambitious Americans, do that. To then insert 'disadvantaged unmotivated' makes it sound like you are thinking of something else, but the only reason I can think of is anti-poor and anti-minority viewpoints, which surely you don't mean. Could you clarify why it was important to add those qualifiers?

Does it also guide your thinking about how to accept refugees?

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#159
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was responding to the article, but the WSJ article is not about the super-rich moving here. It is about the vast majority of skilled immigrants who have to go through the H-1B visa as a step in their immigration process.

What neither the article nor the underlying report resolve is, do immigrant founders of $1B+ companies representative of the same population of H1-B visa recipients? For example, many of the founders came to the US to go to school in the US, including Harvard. Is that reflective of the general population of H1-B visa holders? If not, can the conclusions drawn from the very small number of $1B+ startups be used to mak…

> do immigrant founders of $1B+ companies representative of the same population of H1-B visa recipients?

You make a very good point here. The thing is that it is absolutely impossible to filter or select for future $1B+ startup founders.

Most immigrant tech startup founders in the Bay Area first come to the US as foreign students. They then get a job like most people, but also have to go through a long and difficult struggle with the U.S. immigration system in order to get a green card. Only after getting a green card, do most start a company (because self-sponsorship with your own company is prohibited on an H-1B visa). For their first 10 years or so in the U.S., they have no laurels to show, and nothing that sets them apart from a typical good software engineer at Google. There is no data point from which you predict that X person is going to become a future successful startup founder.

I am another example of this. Right now, I don't have much to show besides my work experience, some CS research I did in college, and a few GitHub projects. I'd definitely like to start a company some day. I think I am somewhat representative of the general population of H1-B visa holders. That I might some time in the future be far more successful, and a huge blessing to this country's economy, and to its people, cannot be positively predicted based on where I am in life today.

> many of the founders came to the US to go to school in the US, including Harvard

There is no official data that shows you where H-1B visa holders went for college. But I can take an educated guess. Everyone that I've met that is on an H-1B visa graduated from a US school. I would guess at least half of all H-1B visa holders studied in the US.

If you filtered by the ranking of the university that a foreign student attended, and said that only graduates from prestigious widely-famous universities are allowed to stay in this country, and every else from lesser universities, should get kicked out, then I would be kicked out along with them. My guess is that the majority of immigrant startup founders didn't go to Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc.

Re: Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm jaded. But stories like this are planned to divert to things like what IBM are doing or job shops like Tata,etc. "Oh look at what immigrants are contributing in entrepreneurial sense, but ignore how big companies are moving jobs overseas." IBM and Disney, iconic US brands are at the for front of outsourcing local jobs using H1B scabs as the route.

Right idea (being jaded) but wrong reason. It's more likely a political jab at the various GOP candidates' opinions about H1Bs.

The author has been writing about immigration policy for some time. From the bio at the end of the report, this includes 'four and a half years on Capitol Hill on the Senate Immigration Subcommittee' and a 2010 book titled 'Immigration'.

It's therefore very unlikely that this piece concerns the specific views of any of the current candidates but is instead the author's long-term interest.

Moreover, the National Foundation for American Policy focuses "on trade, immigration and related issues" and the board includes "former INS Commissioner James Ziglar." The NFAP is set up to influence policy decisions, and meant to be read by those who regularly read the 'Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post', etc.

All this goes strongly against your hypothesis that it is "a political jab at the various GOP candidates' opinions".

The author previously worked at Cato and other libertian think tanks. These are often aligned with business interests by wanting to reduce the constraints on what a large business is allowed to do. Which is the association that jmspring correctly, IMO, makes.

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