Top officials from the White House and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are in Silicon Valley for the week to solicit viewpoints and input from the start-up community on how the administration can improve the way it hands out visas to talented entrepreneurs who’ve landed funding to create new companies.  While Obama is asking the question how he can improve the immigration process for foreign entrepreneurs, he’s stating to UniVision, “I’ve got 5 years left to solve immigration.”  Our question is, must we really remain in the dark ages for 5 more years?

The article states that comprehensive immigration reform legislation continues to remain stalled in congress, as is specific bi-partisan legislation that attempts to address some of these start-up visa issues. So the Obama administration is left trying to make the most of the rules that it currently has on the books by re-interpreting a more accommodating implementation of those rules with fresh information gathered from the field.   The consensus is that Obama lacks the conviction to use his executive authority in an election year on controversial immigration issues, and that this is simply PR.  We say — this is exactly the time for him to use his executive authority anywhere he possibly can concerning immigration reform.   We shall see if anything comes of this.  More on this here.

We’ve had several blog posts on the reverse brain drain issue.  This is a very interesting post that we found on TechCrunch today by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic who is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University.  The writer expresses concerns as to what is occurring in the IT sector today and why the brightest and the best are deciding not to put down roots in the USA.

Vivek spent Columbus Day in Silicon Valley meeting a roomful of new Indian arrivals to the USA. The event was organized by Think India Foundation, a think tank that seeks to solve problems that Indians face.

When introducing the topic of skilled immigration, the discussion moderator, Sand Hill Group founder M.R. Rangaswami asked the obvious question. How many planned to return to India?  He was shocked to see more than three-quarters of the audience raise their hands.  One has to ask why would such talented people voluntarily leave Silicon Valley, a place that remains the hottest hotbed of technology innovation on Earth? Or to leave other promising locales such as New York City, Boston and the Research Triangle area of North Carolina?

What they learned was that the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. Clearly these returnees are in the U.S. population’s educational top tier—precisely the kind of people who can make the greatest contribution to an economy’s innovation and growth. And it isn’t just new immigrants who are returning home, we learned. Some 27% of the Indians and 34% of the Chinese had permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens. That’s right—it’s not just about green cards.

We link to a letter co-authored by the Semiconductor Industry of America (SIA) and the Industry of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) to the Congressional Subcommittee on Immigration.  The letter calls for sensible immigration reform – reforming quotas to match industry needs – reducing the ever-growing visa wait times for green-cards for skilled worker.

(Reuters, San Francisco)…..

Silicon Valley is facing a brain drain of high achieving foreign-born students, more of whom are leaving in the face of a chilly local immigration environment in a trend experts say will hurt U.S. high-tech industry competitiveness in the long run.

We link to the article. “We’re simply not producing, in relative terms, significant numbers of engineers or scientists from people who have already been here for a number of generations”, said Wilcox, who specializes in helping the start-ups that gave his bank its name.  “You’ve got to bring them in from the outside.”