India: Want a job? Issue an immigrant visa.
Immigrants are sworn in as citizens during a ceremony May 21, 2007 at George Washington?s Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens in Mount Vernon, Virginia.
Want a job? Issue an immigrant visa.
That's the message suggested by a new study that found immigrants were founding members of nearly a quarter of US start-ups. And if you're issuing those visas, you'd better put the Indians at the top of the list. The same study found that Indians made up a full third of the immigrants playing integral roles at the new companies, according to Reuters.
The study "America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Then and Now," shows that 24.3 percent of engineering and technology start-up companies have at least one immigrant founder serving in a key role, the agency said. Indian-born entrepreneurs, representing 33 percent of the companies, dominated the group.
In Silicon Valley, the numbers are even more dramatic. Among 335 California tech start-ups, 43.9 percent were founded by at least one immigrant, the study determined.
"If we had a startup visa, we would have tens of thousands of new startups nationwide," the agency quoted Singularity University's Vivek Wadhwa as saying.