Forbes Magazine
Robert E. Litan is vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation and a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
A common refrain among xenophobes is that immigrants take away our jobs. The appropriate response to that kind of talk is, Let's come up with a way to get immigrants to create jobs instead. Here's one way: a job creator's visa.
The program could work as follows. Immigrant entrepreneurs get a one-year visa enabling them to launch a business and to search for employees. Once they hire at least one nonfamily member--who must be an American citizen--they could stay for five years. If they hire more than ten U.S. workers, they get their green card.
Such a scheme would exploit two phenomena in the job market. First, nearly all new jobs are created by relatively new companies. A recent study from my colleagues at the Kauffman Foundation (see "Every Man [and Woman] an Entrepreneur") found that young companies (those less than one year old) create 3 million American jobs a year, while older firms destroy a million.
Second, immigrants are far more likely--30% more inclined, by some estimates--to form new companies than are native-born citizens. Ebay, Google ( GOOG - news - people ) and PayPal were all cofounded by immigrants; AT&T, U.S. Steel ( X - news - people ) and Procter & Gamble ( PG - news - people ) were also created by foreigners searching for opportunity in the U.S.
Today there are 1 million highly skilled immigrants in this country legally, if temporarily, on H-1B visas. Another 125,000 foreigners graduate from our universities each year. If only 10% of them launched businesses under this program, we'd have 110,000 new jobs right off the bat. Immigrant founders would then have superstrong incentives to expand their businesses in the U.S. so they could stay here.
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I support your views & hope that the government will take some action to generate jobs with the help of Immigrants.
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