Trump administration has plan to scrap ‘startup visa’ rule

Here is the detailed comment by "Immigration Voice" on why the rule is bad for everyone except special interest:

"...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...

Not if the earner centralizes their profits and hangs on to the capital - then it just furthers our wealth inequality and harms poorer Americans at the expense of wealthy visa-holders. They can still drain our system, they just do it the Walmart way.

Letting people in for a brick of hard cash seems much less likely to foster the sort of values that would result in visa holders not wanting to loot the country for a quick profit.

I don't think this is true, because generally people who earn lots of money are in a better position to prevent the taking of that money, via having the capital to pool with other ultra-rich to lobby against taxes, pay accountants to find tax loopholes, etc.

When you say 1 Mil easy-to-get, do you mean visas that cost $1M (those exist), or 1 million count of visas?