KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As Congress and President Obama wrangle over the budget, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is trying to jump-start economic growth. Kauffman, a research and philanthropic foundation devoted to entrepreneurship and innovation, is trying to improve U.S. immigration policy to create new companies and help existing ones.
Startups lead to innovation, which leads to economic growth. If we had another two dozen new Apples or Facebooks every year, our economic growth and our employment would take off.
Kauffman scholar Timothy Kane told me that new companies, those in their first few years of existence, on average add more new workers than older companies. Some companies start and fail, but others make up for it, and more.
And data show that immigrants create new companies in America at greater rates than do native-born Americans. If we allowed more immigrants to enter, and gave green cards to those who created jobs, employment would rise.
Immigrants Jerry Yang founded Yahoo; Pierre Omidyar started eBay; and Elon Musk founded PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX. In the past, to name but a few, America benefited from immigrants Alexander Graham Bell, Levi Strauss and Adolph Coors. That’s phones, denims, and beer — what else does one need for a happy life?
A bill sponsored by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., would give visas to entrepreneurs who hire native-born Americans. The Kerry-Lugar Startup Visa Act would set up a new class of visa called the EB-6, aimed especially at entrepreneurs.
Those who could bring in capital from abroad, or who have already generated U.S. sales, would be eligible. If they hired non-family employees, the EB-6 would become a green card, and they could stay forever and become citizens.
The Kerry-Lugar bill proposes about 5,000 EB-6 visas a year. The Kauffman Foundation suggests making the number unlimited, to allow as many founders as possible to have the opportunity to come to America to start companies.
Immigrants who did not hire workers would not receive green cards and would have to return to their countries. In essence, the Kauffman plan would allow America to take a number of potential entrepreneurs on a provisionary basis, and keep the successful ones.
This visa would be especially attractive to some of the million immigrants in America who now have temporary H1-B visas, work permits obtained by employers that require workers eventually to return to their home countries.
Another group that could benefit would be the 60,000 foreign students who graduate with American degrees in the technical fields of science, technology, engineering and math.
There’s another way that visas could help our job picture, according to Kauffman Vice President Robert Litan. We could be giving out more tourist visas, and promoting our country, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, as a prime global vacation spot.
Walk into a hotel in Zurich, Switzerland, and you can find a brochure in Mandarin Chinese promoting the surrounding area. Walk into the Willard Hotel in Washington and you see nothing in Mandarin, and little in any other languages. It’s no wonder that Chinese tourists go to Switzerland or Singapore.
Instead, our embassies and consulates around the globe seek to discourage visitors. They interrogate them and make sure they don’t want to stay here.
We have a natural desire for security. But we need to work out some way that tourism and security can be reconciled. All states offer attractive tourist destinations, and with the weak dollar, America is good value.
During his campaign, Obama promised to fix immigration. A better immigration policy could help create innovation and economic growth. We need these now more than ever.
Examiner Columnist Diana Furchtgott-Roth ([email protected]), former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
