Growth Times » How does Canada Compete with the U.S. for Immigrant Tech Entrepreneurs?

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A great post today by Suzanne Dingwall Williams of Venture Law Associates LLP in Toronto , regarding the recent considerations by the U.S. to increase the number of H1B visas for skilled foreign workers, apparently thanks to a push by venture capitalists.

The stats she quotes are startling:

“A recently released study by the NVCA notes that (a) immigrants have started more than 25% of U.S. public companies that were formerly venture backed, and (b) more than 50% of the employment generated by U.S. public venture-backed companies has come from immigrant-founded companies like Intel, eBay, Yahoo!, and Sun.

The New York Times has also taken note, citing Harvard Law professor Vivek Wadhwa’s claim that 52.4% of today’s Silicon Valley startups have at least one foreign founder. US VCs are figuring that, to expand domestic deal flow, they need to expand the immigrant entrepreneur base.”

Having lived in six countries including the U.S., I can tell for a fact that the amount of energy I deployed to learn about and obtain the visas and other administrative passes giving me the right to stay and to work is stupendous. In volume, it easily equals the time required to launch the operations of a start-up. This truly is wasted time. If the U.S. had made it easier for me to stay after my years at Stanford, I’d likely be there. I truly love Canada and Toronto is my favorite city in the world – but on a professional level, for tech entrepreneurs the environment is just not comparable to California. So the main advantage of Canada over the U.S., as Suzie ...

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http://www.growthtimes.com/2009/10/how-does-canada-compete-with-the-u-s-for-immigrant-tech-entrepreneurs/

http://www.growthtimes.com/2009/10/how-does-canada-compete-with-the-u-s-for-immigrant-tech-entrepreneurs/