Give Me Your Entrepreneurs, Your Innovators

Dane and I have a policy brief out today that looks at a few possible scenarios of job creation that could result from a startup visa (paper is here; press release summary is here). The Startup Act 3.0 bill proposes to create 75,000 visas for immigrant entrepreneurs who found companies. We estimate this could result in, at a minimum, somewhere between 500,000 and 1.6 million jobs created after 10 years. The legislation calls for 75,000 visas to be active at any given time, meaning that 75,000 visas could be filled and then no new visas would be issued until one of those slots opened (presumably because a startup failed or the startup graduates from the visa program). Employment projections would be much larger if the pool was expanded or if visas were allocated annually. More details and caveats about how we constructed the scenarios are available in the paper.

Comments

[Steve Chayer]

I appreciate where you are coming from with this proposed legislation and I do not doubt the results that would be realized. I sigh, however, when I think that the same energy directed at removing regulatory hurdles and burdens here at home would unleash 100 times the results. To paraphrase David Burkus at TEDxOU: "Maybe we don't need more good ideas, just a way of delaing with rejection." I say 'just a way of dealing with discouragement.'