Global Entrepreneurs Ending the Recession

Often start-ups are not seen as the way to create large quantities of jobs. People see them as small, risky, and not worth the investment. What they forget is that all big corporations were at one time a start-up! While not all start-ups will become the next Microsoft, some of them will and create lasting jobs and innovation to keep the US ahead.
Thomas Friedman wrote an interesting piece on this last week:
Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at thenbsp;Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.” Message: If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies — fast.....And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers. “Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
 
Currently, there is a piece of legislation being dicussed to allow Visas to immigrants creating start-ups.
Introduced by Senators Kerry (D-MA) and Lugar (R-IN), the legislation creates a class of visas for foreign-born entrepreneurs backed by qualified U.S. venture investors. It's a key issue for anyone who cares about U.S. competitiveness, as well as supporting innovators around the globe. As a bit of background, the Startup Visa Act would create a new visa class solely for foreign company founders with $250,000 in U.S. venture investment. If after two years they had created five full-time jobs and received another $1 million in investment (or achieved revenue of $1 million), they would automatically receive permanent resident status.
These stats help make a good case to pass this legislation. What do you think? Should we offer startup visas?
 
By Christine Ribeiro. Christine is an Associate at MassChallenge.