Not apropos of recent discussion but relevant to our putative topic:
NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw visited Silicon Valley last
month to meet immigrant entrepreneurs. At Microsoft's Mountain
View campus, he met with a dozen of them. More than half said that
they might be forced to return to their home countries. That's
because they have the same visa issues that Kunal Bahl had. Unable
to get a visa that would allow him to start a company after he
graduated from Wharton in 2007, Kunal returned home to India. In
February 2010, he started SnapDeal -- India's Groupon. Instead of
creating hundreds of jobs in the U.S., Kunal ended up creating
them in New Delhi.
At a time when our economy is stagnating, some American political
leaders are working to keep the world's best and brightest
out. They mistakenly believe that skilled immigrants take American
jobs away. The opposite is true: skilled immigrants start the
majority of Silicon Valley startups; they create jobs.
[snip]
Michelle Zatlyn, a Canadian who founded Cloudflare (a TechCrunch
Disrupt runner-up), said that American visa policies are very
outdated and do not "promote entrepreneurship in this country at
all". She told Brokaw that her startup was trying to create jobs
and hire engineers, but that the country had almost made her leave
before she had an opportunity to build a company.
[snip]
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/why-silicon-valley-immigrant-entrepreneurs-are-returning-home/
or if you trust URL-shortening servers: http://j.mp/f8DdjQ
[ Yo, Ms. Zatlyn. Whyncha come back to Canada? NS gots lotsa
[ well-trained (some even well-educated) techie types like to do yer
[ stuff. Unless you already got filthy rich, you can buy a nice big
[ house here for 1/20 what you pay there.
- Mike
PS: I have a friend in Marblehead, Mass, who bought a crappy little
house in the 70s for not very much. Now, well maintained but only
slightly upgraded, it's worth over a million bucks. She'd like to
move to the San Francisco Bay area but wouldn't be able to afford
a comparable dwelling there on a mere $mil.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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