BRAIN
DRAIN
HUFFINGTON
11.11.12
“If Mark Zuckerberg had been
a foreign student, Facebook
would never have gotten
started in the United States.”
I met Darash a few weeks after his visa was denied at his office in downtown San Francisco.
The windows were open, and
you could hear the clang of trolley bells down below on Market
Street. Behind him were framed
photos of his wife and two kids
— ages 8 and 18 months. It was
a Thursday morning, and he had
just showed off his company’s
software to a potential client.
Later, he would meet with his programmers and talk to investors.
Then, he would close his office
door to talk privately with lawyers
about his last-minute options to
remain in the country.
Stories like his are not unique.
They’re also troubling for the
U.S. economy, advocates say. For
the first time, the number of immigrant-founded startups is in
decline, as foreign-born entrepreneurs struggle to obtain a limited
number of visas and green cards
and decide to launch companies
in other countries that offer perks
to start businesses there. Losing
founders like Darash, who launch
startups that create jobs, means
that America risks losing a source
of employment and a competitive
edge in the global economy as the
country claws its way out of a recession, they say.
For years, immigrant entrepreneurs have propelled the growth
of Silicon Valley, building some
of the most successful tech companies in the world: Sergey Brin,
co-founder of Google, was born
in Russia; Elon Musk, co-founder
of PayPal and Tesla, was born in
South Africa; Vinod Khosla, cofounder of Sun Microsystems,
was born in India. When they
immigrated, it was likely easier
for them because there was not
a backlog that there is today, according to Vivek Wadhwa, a professor at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University who
researches high-tech immigration.
Immigrants are more than twice
as likely to start a business as
native-born Americans, according