Have rank and file developers ever tried to form any sort of association to advocate for their own interests, which seem adverse to those of founder types? It would seem like there are a couple hundred thousand tech types in California alone who would prefer not to have compete with a new flood of H1B and other visa holders. I support the type of candidates that this story is about but my fear would be that it's a back end run by the entrenched interests to turn a small pathway into a large one, and a couple years later we awake to find thousands of ''exceptional'' cubical dwellers in Infosys' new offices.
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
I was thinking along the same lines, a startup devop is a completely different person than the person who customizes Lotus Notes or SAP for a blue chip company.
I recently interviewed, and the guy was frightened when I told them I would probably not be at the same company in 5 years. Nope, I work night and day, but I'm burnt after 3 years on the same project, that's how it works. But in those 3 years, I bring the dev team from interns to a professional state, get a new UI out, and take some funding (well, at least I did it twice), and try to spread some values I deem good in the team.
The O1A visa is definitely the right visa for startup founders. I think that with a little hair-twisting and a good attorney, the current criteria for the visa can be twisted to cover most startup founders who have some kind of a track record.
I am by no means someone special in any way, compared to things that many other HNers have done. But I have now received an O1A visa successfully, twice.
I think the bigger problem with having that visa (or an H1B) is that it makes the prospect of quitting incredibly daunting. Each time you change your job, you have to leave the country, apply anew, risk being denied, and spend another 10k on legal & filing fees.
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.
Yes, on paper the requirements are pretty much the same. But, O1s and EB-1s are processed by different offices within the USCIS. I've found that whomever processes the EB-1s tends to be much more strict than for O-1s. I've had an identical case get approved for O-1 and rejected for EB-1.
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.
The filing fees will run up about 2k including expedited processing (which is usually worth it). You're gonna have to go through a quite thorough process of building up a detailed dossier making your case for the government to review. This can easily cost 5-10k, depending on your attorney and the complexity of your case.
-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...
Infosys pretty much single-handedly ruined the opportunities for so many non-Americans to move onwards in their career. I really hope the US does something to shut down the Infosys US sweatshops.
I'm unclear on exactly what change Ohanian is proposing. Most of the changes mentioned can already be used to apply for the visa, can't they? So what is the actual legislative change being proposed?
Is the proposal really that YC acceptance becomes a singular criteria for getting the visa? So YC and their peers, in effect, would have full power to grant unlimited visas to people of their choice?
If that is what is being proposed, that sounds like a massive conflict of interest, with potential for serious abuse, even if the intent is positive.
> If that is what is being proposed, that sounds like a massive conflict of interest, with potential for serious abuse, even if the intent is positive.
Let's say for a moment, for the sake of argument, that YC decided to be unethical and accept payment in exchange for "accepting" people to the program to get them a visa.
1) Would it be so terrible to have people who have enough money to afford such a bribe be in the US contributing to the economy?
2) Do you really think YC would stake their reputation on such an abuse?
3) O1A visas are often given to artists, actors and athletes. Do you think that there isn't at least a few theater and movie production houses (usually underfunded and desperate for cash) that are accepting the payments to list a rich foreigner as an "actor" in their show?
In other words, I don't think this is actually a huge concern.
Do you really think YC would stake their reputation
on such an abuse?
If they won't, Michaelt's Used Cars And Startup Incubator will accept any company with the application fee (2% preferred stock equity and $5000 per visa required).
Or will the government get into ranking and evaluating incubators?
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.
At Michaelt's Used Cars And Startup Incubator, $1000 of your application fees go on paying Mechanical Turk workers $1 a time to submit junk applications for immediate rejection :)
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.
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.
The problem isn't straight up payment in exchange for being "accepted" into YC. The same way people don't straight up pay employers for H1B visas.
The problem is that it still allows private individuals to profit by being gatekeepers to the country. Extracting unfavorable financing deals that wouldn't be tenable if the investor didn't also hold the founders' residency permits, extracting corporate governance concessions for the same reasons. The list goes on.
We've seen widespread abuse of the H1B visa when it comes to turning labor into near-indentured servitude, particularly around the green card process. There's no reason to believe that YC, or any of the high-profile players in the Silicon Valley Funding Party are above it.
> "1) Would it be so terrible to have people who have enough money to afford such a bribe be in the US contributing to the economy?"
Yes. There is an investment track immigration option for people who simply want to buy their way into the country - this money goes to fund all manners of things, instead of into private pockets of a hypothetically corrupt YC.
> "2) Do you really think YC would stake their reputation on such an abuse?"
Yes. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. If you give anyone the power to completely upend someone else's life at a whim, abuses will occur. Incentives are incredibly strong, and the slope is incredibly slippery. It will start with a gentle tilting of negotiations in favor of investors, and over years evolve into progressively more aggressive concessions.
At no point will anyone feel they are doing something overtly evil, just like how holding promotions back and lowering raises is just a matter of course when someone is in the midst of a green card application right now. It will all happen slowly enough that it won't feel like "abuse", it'll feel like "just the way things are".
> "3) O1A visas are often given to artists, actors and athletes. Do you think that there isn't at least a few theater and movie production houses (usually underfunded and desperate for cash) that are accepting the payments to list a rich foreigner as an "actor" in their show?""
Are we really making this argument? This boils down to "there is abuse happening elsewhere so we'll tolerate abuse here". Abuse of a system is abuse of a system - that it's happening elsewhere (possibly happening elsewhere I might add) doesn't justify it in our own back yard.
Letting private individuals gate-keep the country's citizenship/residency is a terrible, awful, stupid idea. It is a good idea only when predicated upon the assumption that the leaders of our industry are incorruptible.
Look at the Bay Area. Really look at the Bay Area. Is there any convincing evidence of the tech industry's incorruptibility?
There is no legislative change being proposed. Rather, it's a regulatory change that YC is requesting.
And the change was basically, here are the criteria as they currently stand. If we squint at the language, startup founders can successfully apply for this visa. But it's a torturous process, very variable in length of time, plenty of people don't apply.
Goal: regularize the preparatory process for founders so that it is repeatable and predictable.
Process: look at the existing criteria language, which is defined by statute and cannot be changed without passing a law. Suggest reinterpretations of that criteria language such that within existing law, founders whose startups are demonstrating metrics of success understood within our community can use those metrics to also successfully apply for a visa.
Right now, there are eight criteria to qualify for the O-1A, of which, an applicant needs to establish three of those criteria qualifications. About half are clearly directly intended for academics, aka "where has your research been published?"
One change proposed is that high signal accelerators be seen as prestigious associations, traditionally including late-career honors, e.g. IEEE lifetime achievement. Yet YC has an acceptance rate lower than Harvard (a gameable metric to be sure). It's incredibly competitive. Yet completely unknown within DC as such an honor. Or TechStars; or 500Startups. But the predictable question from DC is where to draw that line? And our response should be to figure out how to generalize investor/accelerator signal strength such that DC can use it for establishing visa qualifications.
But hopefully to assuage your concerns, no YC acceptance doesn't become a singular criterion for getting the visa. Though if accepted, the changes would see YC/500/TS/similar acceptance as one of three criteria needed to qualify for the O-1A.
And over time, I would certainly expect AngelList, Mattermark, Disruption, &c... to be valuable for establishing investor signal metrics to complement the "accelerator as educational institute" model that the regulatory proposal alludes to.
Finally, keep in mind that the startup visa legislative proposal involved funding levels (lower than YC or most other seed-level funding rounds) and jobs created (usually directly proportional to funding). So investors would still see a conflicts of interest there. It has been something I've grappled with in years of pushing startup visa. Do you have any proposed solutions or improvements over either the legislative model or this proposed regulatory change?
I've considered a semi-independent Self Regulating Organization (SRO), like the financial sector has with FINRA. But that's so anti-lean, there has never seemed to be much support within the investor community, leaving aside the massive turnover of startups. But theoretically, it'd be a group that removes YC or similar from the direct equation by recognizing prestigious investors or accelerator programs. You'd ask for folks like Naval Ravikant (or Kevin Laws) to serve on the board and recuse themselves where they're LP'd or do (significant?) along-side investment (or maybe simply investment at a similar level of startup development, i.e. seed, A, B, &c...).
It's a bit sad that such big players are fighting for such a small, incremental step. The number of successful founders facing immigration problems sounds like it would be orders of magnitude smaller than the number of potential foreign employees. Is my intuition wrong there?
I also fear that a "win" here will allow legislators to push off further reform (e.g. "we just did something") instead of serve as a meaningful stepping stone.
Okay, lesson one here. There is a huge difference between legislation and executive action.
As a community, we will still need immigration reform legislation should the White House agree to push this change through at the regulatory level. Legislation is the only way we get a viable, sustainable solution. And the proposal in the comprehensive immigration bill was the best policy proposal yet, with their non-immigrant X visa and immigrant (green card) EB-6.
But to get this small, incremental step done through executive action doesn't involve legislators (except in the negative, aka the effort saw YC going around the Hill asking folks to not link any hypothetical change in this space to the much more politically controversial changes coming about deportations).
So while there is a large change Congress continues to do nothing on startup visa or larger immigration reform for the next several years, it won't be because a potential win here will give legislators an out.
Finally, yes, the whole point of startup visa is to avoid the increasingly contentious debate over H-1Bs and foreign employees. Founders are small in number but very clearly hire Americans and directly drive economic growth. Politically, it's a no-lose proposition.
So it was a feature, not a bug, that this push focused on founders rather than employees, was small and incremental, and was executive focused rather than legislative.
That may be true, but remember; founders are much important to YC's bottom line than the employees that those founders who become successful may or may not hire later.
Ehhh, that's pretty cynical. I don't want to blindly support YC, but this seems fairly debatable. YC wants to give founders resources to succeed. One necessary resource to succeed is employees. Given the current tech hiring climate, I wouldn't be shocked if more foreign employees leads to a measurable and significant improvement in their bottom line. I think you will need to make a few too many assumptions to argue that one is definitively better for their bottom line.
Perhaps one appeal of this approach, though, is that this effort aligns better with legislator's "bottom line" - if you look at their bottom line as job creation.
So for a rather refreshing change, tech employers should be honest. There is zero engineering shortage; instead, they want to use h1bs to drive down the prevailing wages. There are also plenty of very skilled mid-career engineers who have left the valley for the midwest because of the better net financial situation when a starter home doesn't cost $1.1m. If valley employers paid better, or got their shit together and pushed the governments here to allow affordable housing, they'd have plenty of engineers available.
I do believe talking about H1Bs for employees (non-founders) and its effect of driving down prevailing wages is somewhat off-topic.
I myself am an Indian citizen. I studied in Boston, moved to California with an upperclassman and started a company during my OPT. The company is fairly well-rooted while bootstrapped, but doesn't have massive funding in place yet. Towards the end of my OPT, I tried to apply for the H1B just because I wanted to continue working on the company I started, and because I'd come to call California home.
Are you suggesting my team find an American engineer of equal skill take my place in the tiny company I started for the no-salary I was earning, as cofounder? I'm confused.
As it stands I didn't get through the H1B lottery two years in a row, and am now pursuing this O1A visa, although this being my first startup (and job) out of college my track record is a bit sparse.
h1b is flat on topic: see comments below. The act of legislating is trading between competing interests; various people are attempting to use startups as a whole to get self-serving visa changes with zero to negative benefits to the majority of the members of the startup community: non-founders.
On to you: your situation is the exception to the common use of h1bs. You're probably a giant minority. The common use as far as I know of h1bs is to hold down wages of engineering. Microsoft and yahoo laying off engineers while simultaneously applying for h1b visas trivially demonstrates the lie in the "engineer shortage" nonsense.
Employee friendly changes to h1b visas could include many things: removing the tie between the sponsoring company and the employee (so if he or she is underpaid he or she can easily switch jobs); or aggressive investigation of prevailing wage requirements (oops there goes Infosys' business model); or 5+ year bans on h1b applications post layoffs. But bluntly, I think we have more than enough visas already. I'd change my mind if I saw engineering wages rise, concerted action on the part of ceos to help control housing costs, and concerted action on the part of ceos to help fix US education and increase the domestic engineering pipeline; or concerted action on the part of ceos to police visa fraud (see infosys, or epic systems, etc).
Theoretically, the H1B application requires evidence that the employee is receiving market-standard pay for the role fulfilled. However, there's a gradual effect over time of course when there's a lot of expats who are willing to work at the lower bound of that pay. So Re: H1B, I pretty much agree with you, and I think immigrant employee visas need to be restructured to really punish the Wipros/Infosys' that just import manslaves that are fed change to output code, lowering the average engineer's pay.
I was raising the point regarding my position because that seemed to be the thesis of the article -- for people more in my position than for employees of companies on the scale of Microsoft, etc. We are not entering the US with the objective of taking other people's jobs. The only reason I applied for the H1B was because it was the legit path with the most reasonable chance to get cleared. I think it's the wrong kind of visa for a founder to attempt to get, there just isn't a better one.
So YC and people like me are hoping for a visa similar to the O1A, except right now that is expensive to file, vague in the conditions that need to be cleared, and usually needs you to foot a fat lawyer bill too. And it's a bit of a stretch to be applied to founders. Essentially, the existing visas are all hardly different from 10-15 (or more) years ago, times have changed, and the government has done nothing to accommodate the changes in the economy.
yeah, but we both know that evidence is farcical. Epic System's practices are pretty well documented. And just this week, I was hit up by a recruiter looking to pay "up to 120k" for a data scientist with 4-7 years experience, ms/phd, and experience with hadoop and large-scale stochastic optimization. It's not hard to figure out why someone's paying for a recruiter to try to fill a job with a stupid low salary.
Refusing to support companies asking for friendly visa changes for free is employees' best bet at getting said companies to support employee-friendly changes.
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.
^ 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.
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.
As an employee, I don't particularly want a startup visa: I'm neutral to slightly negative on the idea. But certainly we -- as employees -- should get something in exchange for support. That's how the legislative process works. Bluntly: you're attempting to use support from the startup community to actively buy the change you want while, as employees, we get nothing in return.
Indeed. I'm a H1-B visa holder, with exceptional wages, and my wife is not allowed to work here. Ok, so she finished her Ph.D in the 3 years here.
But with all this new visa drama going on, no updates in the visa extension process so far, and the broken promise that spouses will be able to work, I just told my company that I'll have to go back to Germany and work remote from there.
Plan B.
But the benefit is that I will be able to live in a democratic country again, with a much better standard of living. It's only 7 hours and I worked remote for a couple of US companies before.
If companies need those foreigners why should the government on behalf of the unions intervene? Do they know better than the companies which is good for them?
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.
We definitely need to get more creative with visas. Gov. Snyder here in Michigan has proposed in a meeting with President Obama that he help create 50,000 visas over five years for immigrants willing to live in Detroit. They would either have advanced degrees or exceptional ability in certain fields.
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.
I like the creativity of the idea, but jesus, how would that work in reality?
Do you have to prove residency in Detroit? Do you have to work for a company in Detroit? What if you pick up and leave? Do you get deported? How would they even track that?
The main problem with that scheme is that it is designed to channel people to where he and the President WANT them...
as opposed to where the United States NEEDS them. I think we should give out visas to Masters and PhDs and allow those people to go where they please. That way... we would get the best people as well... not just the most desperate.
From a 'rate of employment in the population' perspective surely you don't want people immigrating who will replace native workers (or indeed any worker currently in post)?
What's the benefit to the country if a new worker from abroad replaces a current worker but at a lower wage if that means the person 'usurped' needs state assistance or becomes under-employed (and bumps someone else from work to benefit-reliance)? Sure business owners probably benefit but such benefit seems pretty localised.
How about if you let a lot of foreign workers come in who are well skilled and they flood a field in such a way that no students leaving college in that field can get a job. The incoming worker likely can accept lower wages which local [likely] debt-laden students can't. The field falls flat - the local population stop training in that field and you've either got a future skill crisis or a long-term reliance on immigrant workers.
If you want to preference native/endemic population over immigrants at all then I think you need to be very specific in the immigration you allow.
How about re-purposing H1s issued to the sweatshop Indian firms ( which generally bring in the cheap labor) to tech companies and startups. That is probably tens of thousands of visas right there.
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.
Can't some form of executive action be taken ? Perhaps enforce the H1 rules closer to the vest. The body shops are so bad. They force many of the onshore resources to work full-time then another 3 hours on nights + weekends to feed work to their offshore cohorts so that they can bill out the offshore guys which is where they have even better margins.
I like the idea of linking a work via to a person who has been able to raise money. I mean, why the hell would you not want that person to stay in the US?
One concern might be the ability to game the system, but I think with the right parameters that could be minimized.
Yep! But what attracted us to this change was that the prep time those good attorneys required has been highly variable. If you have a lot of old media coverage, it could be a 1 month prep time + 2 weeks DC adjudication. If not, it could be an 8 month prep time + 2 weeks DC adjudication.
The goal of expanding the criteria definitions to more broadly mesh up with the lifecycle of successful startups and linking in the investor signal parameter into the review process will be to change that curve to be much more bunched up against the 1 month bins.
And yes, part of our argument was that startup founders /are/ doing all of these things already. Just it takes time that kills startups, and startups are also doing a lot of extraneous work (e.g. chasing NYT coverage when more TC or re/code coverage is what's needed to get another wave of early adopters or investor interest for that next round's buzz) to qualify for the visa when they should instead be focusing on product and traction.
