For decades, the US has been the bastion of innovation and more recently, technological creativity that has fueled startup ventures. On closer examination, it’s interesting to find that a high-proportion of the ventures are credited to immigrants.
A recent article on Axios.com reported that of the 87 startups worth at least $ 1 billion in 2016, more than half were founded or co-founded by US immigrants. The most highly represented country was India, which produced 14 of those entrepreneurs, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom, which each produced eight.
This is important to recognize because the US is now overturning the visas that had enabled those foreigners to start new businesses stateside. Worse yet, there was a 17% drop in international students in the US last year, in large part due to the 28% decline in visas granted to students from India.
There’s no doubt that we need to address illegal immigration, but closing the gates on the best and the brightest outside of our shores is an obviously detrimental move. One look at the statistics above shows that stifling the immigration of would-be entrepreneurs to our country is clearly not in our best interests.