President Donald Trump’s administration is postponing a program that provides visa for foreign entrepreneurs to launch companies in the United States. It plans to review whether or not to cancel the program.
The program which was started last year by then-President Barack Obama allowed foreign entrepreneurs who have their startup in the US to live there.
The visa program was supposed to come into effect on July 17, 2017, but with the change n the rules by the Donald Trump administration has led to the delay in its implementation and resulted in the tightening of work visa rules making the Indian IT companies in the US suffer, according to an India.com report.
“This is unquestionably a setback for the United States in the global race for talent,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an immigration advocacy group backed by the tech industry. The start date of the rule has been pushed back to March 2018 while it collects comments regarding “a proposal to rescind the rule,” according to a notice that is to be published in the Federal Register, the report said.
Immigrants have started more than half of US startups valued at $1 billion dollars or more, and are key members of either management or product development teams in more than 70% of these companies, according to a 2016 study by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), a US-based non-profit nonpartisan public policy think tank. Out of these, people of Indian origin have found almost 30%.
Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic while talking about the new policy said, “Without a doubt, bringing in entrepreneurs creates American jobs and expands the economy, it is the closest thing there could be to a free lunch for the United States. This is lose-lose for the US and for the entrepreneurs who would have come here but it will benefit the countries where they would have come from.”
As per the NFAP study, 14 Indian-origin entrepreneurs have started billion dollar companies in the US which are collectively valued at $19.6 billion. The foundation had evaluated 87 startup companies valued at over $1 billion as of January 1, 2016, for the study. The Obama administration’s idea was to keep high-calibre talent who come to the US for studies but return to their countries and start businesses that become huge successes. Read more about Indian Startup Ecosystem.
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