A shock government order final week put a $100,000 payment on new H-1B visa purposes, alarming the U.S. tech trade and resurfacing a long-running debate: are expert immigrants rivals for American jobs, or essential drivers of innovation?
This week’s GeekWire Podcast visitor, Shirish Nadkarni, is aware of this debate firsthand.
A Microsoft veteran and serial entrepreneur whose startups had been acquired by BlackBerry and Rosetta Stone, Nadkarni immigrated from India a long time in the past. His new e-book, The Indian American Tech Success Story, makes the case that immigrant founders — particularly from India — are amongst America’s biggest financial property.
Nadkarni defined that this wave of immigrant-led innovation wasn’t an accident, however a direct results of forward-thinking U.S. coverage on the time. He pointed to key laws together with the pivotal Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which opened the doorways for expert immigrants from international locations like India and China, who had lengthy been excluded underneath earlier immigration legal guidelines.
As he writes within the e-book, that coverage shift coincided completely with the rise of the tech trade and the founding of establishments just like the Indian Institutes of Expertise (IITs). This created a pipeline of expertise, in the end fueling the rise of Silicon Valley, Seattle, and different tech hubs, and laying the groundwork for at present’s entrepreneurial ecosystem
He says the same mindset is essential at present, particularly for the U.S. to win the AI race.
“How are we going to compete with China if we don’t benefit from the perfect expertise all over the world to assist us?” he stated throughout our podcast dialog.
Nadkarni known as for immigration reforms to unlock extra entrepreneurial potential — from a devoted startup visa to eliminating nation caps within the green-card system. The present backlog for Indian candidates is greater than a decade, a bottleneck that he says has already discouraged many IIT graduates from pursuing careers within the U.S.
He stated he hopes the brand new H-1B payment can be efficiently challenged in court docket.
Even with this setback, Nadkarni stated he stays optimistic about the way forward for U.S. innovation. “We now have the perfect minds on this planet,” he stated. “I anticipate that they’ll proceed to discover a solution to come and contribute to the U.S. financial system, and we are going to proceed to have actually nice startups.”
Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you pay attention.
Associated Hyperlinks and Tales
- Startup leaders: New $100K H-1B visa payment will harm U.S. entrepreneurship and innovation
- New TiE Seattle president on how the $100K H-1B payment may snuff out entrepreneurial flame
- Will new U.S. visa payment enhance Canada? B.C. sees a gap in opposition to Seattle and Silicon Valley
Audio enhancing by Curt Milton.
