HistoryInAction

And for anyone interested in the topic, the article is already out of date, as entrepreneurial parole is currently blocked due to a regulatory freeze: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/white-house-orders-imm...

University makes the call. If you're pre-funded, you'll work as a part-time mentor, 8-10 hours a week; post-funded, 100% of your time for your startup which has to move on/near campus.

50-70 days from university handshake to visa in hand.

About 10% right now

Depends on the person and their academic backgrounds. The positions are specifically designed so that the students can benefit from that person's specific expertise and experience.

You're thinking of the EB-5 green card perhaps

We're doing strict self-policing so that this isn't the case.

While founders are getting their startups off the ground, they're working 8-10 hours a week as mentors at the center for entrepreneurship.

It's just too much of a risk to flout the clearly defined congressional cap, and since we can help founders, we want to ensure we can continue to do so as we scale rather than calling down the wrath of Congress.

You can meet the requirements in the country on the B-1 business tourist visa, visa waiver, or OPT status as an F-1 holder, but to activate parole, you need to do so outside the country.

IANAL

That's correct. Not the best branding, but I'm sure the White House did what it could.

I'm Craig, quoted in the article as the executive director of the Global EIR Coalition, which is what Nigel is using and is soon to be in the Bay Area as a visa option.

Happy to answer any questions folks have about the cap exemption and the process we're setting up.

He's on Global EIR's legal advisory board, so I'm happy to connect you. I'm at Craig at globaleir org

Concur. Chris Wright down in LA is superb at O-1s, has worked with a lot of founders with positive conclusions. I recommend him highly.

Yep, Craig here with Global EIR. As the other commenter says, research universities use cap exempt H-1Bs for their full-time faculty and also lab technical staff.

Now that all of these universities have entrepreneurship centers, certain options opened up for founders.

Two year mandatory return for many origin countries can make J-1 messy.

Also, J-1 being run by State rather than DHS/USCIS introduces some extra weird things.

Yeah, take a look at the USCIS Visa Guide: http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/

There are lots of different options and none are all that good a fit for founders.

If you've got a year advance notice, you can set things up for the L-1. If you've got the ability to generate old media press and can raise $500k (rule of thumb), then O-1 is a good fit. If you're from the right country with $50k-150k, then E-2. If you're from Australia, E-3.

For the O-1 in particular, the three criteria we tend to use are media coverage, mentorship/conferences, and high salary for those who have been employed previously to becoming entrepreneurs.

YC asked the White House to make some tweaks to the O-1 to be a more straightforward path for founders, but the White House went in a different direction with something yet to be announced.

We have the Global EIR program which might be of assistance. Our flagship program in Boston: http://masstech.org/innovation-institute/projects-and-initia...

We have a pathway that takes advantage of cap-exemptions built into the H-1B program and partnerships with universities. It's pretty straightforward, and in exchange for a few months of part-time work, you'll draw a runway-extending salary and be sponsored for a work visa, after which you'll have a visa runway to raise capital more easily and then switch over to 100% startup time.

www.globaleir.org will have more in a short while.

If you want to be a founder, consider this state level program: http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2015/03/30/cu-boulder-...

Various states who have launched or are considering launching have different requirements. CO does require either an undergrad or masters' degree, so work experience wouldn't count. MA is Masters' only.

Keep in mind that the H-1B itself does offer work equivalency, but it's 3 years work experience → 1 year of academic training, which means that 5+ years is unlikely to meet the USCIS test requirements.

More time for Scrabble, hopefully? ;)

Yep! I came up with that one, at least /grin You start running into various complexity problems with further counter hacks of course :) but institutional investors as LPs with established, credentialed due diligence processes (e.g. CalPERS) may be a response there.

But these were all details to be worked out over the next few weeks iff the WH was willing to move forward with these discussions. It's unclear if that's the case, unfortunately. So we might be discussing details that were never on the table for a broad proposal that has already been rejected on the political merits.

It seems extremely likely that the H-4 spouse EAD (work authorization) change has just been enacted: http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=USCIS-2010-001...

It was proposed by the Department of Homeland Security in May, went through a 90 day public comment period, which is now closed. We're waiting for the official announcement.

Strong suggestions.

Re: the one I know the most about, "removing the tie between the sponsoring company and the employee (so if he or she is underpaid he or she can easily switch jobs)" This is partially done already in AC21: http://immigrationroad.com/green-card/ac21-portability-chang...

The key word is portability, which is a much, much weaker tie between the sponsoring company and the employee, both in terms of job title/salary and switching employers.

However, it's incomplete because employer-based (EB) green card applications aren't portable, so there's still a horrible incentive system there that has a huge negative impact on H-1B-affected wages. Green card portability was included in S744, the comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) legislation, that just failed.

That said, these are all legislative changes. With the failure of CIR, it will be more than a few years before another major effort is attempted on immigration, and at least until January 2017 until even small immigration reforms will be proposed in Congress.

Flatly, there is no chance of any legislative effort succeeding in coming months or even years.

It'd be nice. But likely unfeasible politically either from a legislative or regulatory perspective.

There are many problems using the H-1B even at a policy level:

-Lottery/application in April, don't become active until October

-Doesn't work well for founders despite Aug 2011 change allowing founders to arrange their board to serve as "employer": http://www.uscis.gov/news/public-releases-topic/business-imm...

-Difficult and long timeline to green card meaning startup failure often leads to a fast mandatory exit from the US, even if investors continue to believe in the founder

-Neufeld memo means that startup sponsors are treated at a high level of suspicion by USCIS bureaucrats, which results in an even longer, more time/money/effort intensive process compared to bigtech: http://www.legalactioncenter.org/sites/default/files/docs/la...

That is the exact argument against the H-1B re: "highly skilled" requirement. Code monkeys (as distinct from devs) are a very different fish, but DC doesn't know the difference

The counter I'd offer is that you should look through the eight criteria as they currently stand: http://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-workers...

If you see obvious hacks for the Infosys types that we can close off, that'd be helpful to discuss here.

EDIT: And of course anything resembling a union is verboten among the powers that be in Silicon Valley.

Right on. The proposal had to be set up to prevent such obvious abuse.

One thought was admissions rates, since folks seemed impressed by the soundbite that "YC had a lower admissions rate than Harvard," even leaving aside self-selection biases in the applicant pool.

Another is a startup community-run Self Regulatory Organization (SRO) that would get into the ranking and evaluating business a la Mattermark, with official certification/recognition by the government.

I'd defer to someone like Professors Norm Matloff or Ron Hira on this question.

Honestly, I've spent so long trying to keep startup visa out of the H-1B debate that I'm just not that familiar with it.

I don't disagree with you, but I don't have a sense of the political landscape to give you an answer that isn't a pure guess.

The debate is going on already. Businesses either will or won't be able to buy themselves a self-serving change. But that debate is at a level much higher than that which the startup community can influence.

When I say we in this case, I mean the HN crowd and similar. We as in Americans can debate this issue all you like. But if I want a startup visa, then I want to avoid getting caught up in the H-1B debate.

On paper, yeah. In practice, the Kazarian test changes the EB-1A a bit. I'm unhappy to hear that in practice the difference is that significant.

Link: http://shusterman.com/extraordinaryabilityimmigration.html

Definitely. Unfortunately, that would either require legislation (and something similar has been proposed for a bit by Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Durbin (D-IL)) or a very contentious regulatory process.

Needless to say, the Infosys and Tatas of the world do have a highly developed lobbying arm. As one example of a supportive research group: http://www.offshoreinsights.com/

Startups don't have anything like this, and the tech companies don't want to rock the boat with their outsourcing partners.

To learn more, look at the Hatch amendment to S744 (comprehensive immigration reform): http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/22/hatch_amendme...

Actually, just to clarify some sloppy reporting in the Crain's piece, Gov. Snyder (@onetoughnerd) is requesting 50,000 immigrant visas, aka green cards. Big difference from non-immigrant visas.

The specific visa requested is the EB-2, which basically requires a Masters or PhD as the credential needed to establish exceptional ability in a specific field.

Technically, that already exists on the EB-5 investor green card, which requires an investment of either $500k or $1M and the creation of ten jobs within two years. Except that the investment is intended to be from the applicant's personal capital, which doesn't really work for sweat equity founders.

Exactly. More importantly in the incentive structure I foresee, do you think YC's LPs would allow YC to stake their reputation on such an abuse?

No, actually, this is incorrect. Those are O-1B visas, for the arts, not O-1A, which is business and science.

I have been under a mixed impression on the O-1 for a long time myself. Nikki seems to indicate that hers at least was a work-sponsorship. However, though I don't have a similar anecdote to point to, I understand you can do a self-sponsorship O-1 that isn't tied to an employer.

More research is needed here.

Re: that last point, you're exactly right. See Nikki's piece (search: O-1) https://medium.com/@nikkidurkin99/my-startup-failed-and-this...

Unfortunately, that's a feature, not a bug. The anti-fraud people prefer it that way, and they have a lot of influence within DC to block these proposed changes.

Luckily, the O-1A, in contrast with the H-1B visa, is that it is an analog to a green card, the EB-1A, so if you are able to get an O-1A and wish to get the professional stability that a green card offers, you should be able to quickly progress from O-1A to EB-1A, which doesn't have the badly backlogged lines (especially for Indians or Chinese) of the EB-2 or EB-3 work-based, academic-qualifications green cards.

^ This is the exact debate that should be avoided for startups to be successful in driving through ANY change through DC.

I don't know enough to say what the correct position is on H-1Bs, but I know that many people believe strongly in both sides. We're too small a community to solve the problem here, so all we can do is be caught up in it and have our proposals die like flies on a spider's web.