Give Me Your Entrepreneurs, Your Innovators: Estimating the Employment Impact of a Startup Visa

Even though the United States has an unmatched track record when it comes to the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs, it is well known that current immigration policy is not particularly amenable to foreign-born entrepreneurs. Existing visas that might allow entrepreneurs in (such as the EB-5) have multiple problems associated with them, and it obviously is difficult to estimate the number of entrepreneurs who otherwise have been turned away and companies that have not been created. The idea of visas for immigrant entrepreneurs has bounced around the country for many years, and even has been introduced into Congress on more than one occasion. The most recent is Startup Act 3.0, a bipartisan bill recently introduced into the U.S. Senate that, among other things, includes a Startup Visa. In Give Me Your Entrepreneurs, Your Innovators: Estimating the Employment Impact of a Startup Visa, the authors to estimate the impact on job creation that enactment of such a Startup Visa would have. The calculations suggest that a Startup Visa could create anywhere from 500,000 to 1.6 million jobs over the next ten years. 

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