Silicon Valley Immigration
Floor Speech
Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, the need for economic growth remains one of the most pressing and challenging issues we face today in our country. Unfortunately, over the past decade economic growth has been stagnant, creating difficulties for small businesses, for working families, for recent college graduates, and for entrepreneurs.
If I have a goal here, it is to make certain every American has the opportunity to pursue what we all know is the American dream. For that to be possible, we need a growing economy that accomplishes many things, including creating the opportunity for people to go to work, to pay off their loans, to feed their families, to put food on their familie's table, and to save for their future.
Last month the Senate had an opportunity to do something positive about our economy. We spent a significant amount of time addressing this issue of immigration, trying to fix our Nation's broken immigration system.
Sensible and overdue improvements to our Nation's immigration laws will spur economic growth and create American jobs. This is why I have been so interested to see how highly skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants create jobs and contribute to the U.S. economy. It is that aspect of our Nation's broken immigration system I wish to talk about today.
There is an economic imperative to improve our Nation's immigration laws. Many of our Nation's leading businesses struggle to find the talent they need to grow and compete in global markets. According to the Partnership for a New American Economy, American businesses are projected to need an estimated 800,000 workers with advanced STEM degrees by 2018 but will only find 550,000 American graduates with an advanced STEM education.
First and foremost, we must do more to prepare Americans for careers in science, technology, and engineering. I have been encouraged that several immigration proposals before Congress aim to improve STEM education for Americans so that one day we will no longer be required to seek outside labor to meet our country's needs.
In the short term, we must work to equip Americans with
the skills of the 21st century. We also need to create a path for highly skilled foreign students to stay in the United States, where their ideas, talents, and intellect can fuel American economic growth.
Legislation I introduced with Senator Warner of Virginia called Startup Act 3.0 creates visas for foreign students who graduate from an American university with a master's or Ph.D. in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. These skilled workers would be granted conditional status contingent on them filling a needed gap in the U.S. workforce. This will help growing American companies secure the talent they need now for current job openings. Without this help companies will have to look elsewhere, will find it difficult to find the qualified workers they need, and will likely open locations overseas, taking the jobs with them.
When I was in Silicon Valley last year, I met with executives at Facebook. They told me they were ready to hire close to 80 foreign-born but U.S.-educated individuals in California, but their H-1B visas were not granted. Rather than forgo these skilled workers, the company hired them anyway. That caught my attention, but the story is that they placed them in Dublin, Ireland, not in the United States. Facebook was ultimately able to get visas for these workers after training them in Ireland, but all too often companies end up housing the jobs permanently overseas. When this happens, it is not only those specific jobs that are lost. In this case we didn't just lose 80 jobs but also the many supporting jobs and economic activity associated with those jobs.
Even more damaging, more damning, more frustrating to me is that many of these highly skilled workers who are now employed in some other country will become entrepreneurs that will start successful businesses there, not in the United States. Of the 80 engineers working in Dublin, Ireland, for Facebook, I have no doubt but that one or more of them will be the next originator, the next innovator for companies such as Facebook. We want them in the United States creating that opportunity here for Americans.
Immigrants to the United States have a long history of creating businesses in our country. Today, 1 in every 10 Americans employed at a privately owned U.S. company works at an immigrant-owned firm. Immigrants are more than twice as likely as native-born Americans to start a business. Of the current Fortune 500 companies, more than 40 percent were founded by a first- or second-generation American. Ranked No. 73 on that list is Google, which was cofounded in 1998 by Sergey Brin, an immigrant from Russia. Sergey and his cofounder Larry Page developed Google as Ph.D. students while at Stanford University. Google is now the world's top search engine, generates more than $50 billion in revenue annually, and employs tens of thousands. We need to create an immigration system that welcomes more immigrants like Sergey Brin.
Our bill, Startup Act 3.0, creates an entrepreneur's visa for foreign-born entrepreneurs currently in the United States. Those individuals with a good idea, capital, and a willingness to hire Americans would be able to stay in the United States and grow their businesses here. Each immigrant entrepreneur would be required to create jobs for Americans. Providing a way for an immigrant entrepreneur to stay in the United States and create American jobs makes economic sense.
Earlier this year the Kauffman Foundation, headquartered in Kansas City, studied the economic impact of the entrepreneur's visa in Startup Act 3.0. Using conservative estimates, the Kauffman Foundation predicts that the entrepreneur's visa alone could generate 500,000 to 1.6 million new jobs during the next 10 years. These are real jobs with real economic impact that could boost GDP, by their estimate, by 1.5 percent or more. When we talk about economic growth and creating opportunity, a boost in GDP by 1.5 percent is a major accomplishment.
Recognizing this potential, several bills create visas for immigrant entrepreneurs. It is important that these visas be structured in a way to facilitate job creation. Unnecessarily high investment and revenue requirements and burdensome mandates, such as having to submit a business plan to Washington, DC, bureaucrats, threaten to diminish the impact these entrepreneurial visas could have.
Although well-intentioned, the INVEST visa created in the Senate immigration bill fell prey to some of these traps. To improve that idea, I developed an amendment with the help of entrepreneurs, investors, and startup policy experts. This amendment would reduce paperwork and reporting requirements so that entrepreneurs could spend more time building their businesses, allow entrepreneurs to secure initial investment from those closest to them, add flexibility to the way in which startup employees are compensated to account for geographic and industry differences, and clarify that the jobs created by immigrant entrepreneurs must be held by Americans.
A list of more than 30 startup companies, investors, and business leaders and immigration attorneys supported this amendment.
Sadly, like many other amendments, it was blocked from even receiving consideration. But in the end, that may not matter. The Speaker of the House has said the Senate immigration bill is ``dead on arrival.'' Instead of taking up Senate legislation, the House is pursuing, perhaps, a more thoughtful, methodical approach to immigration--writing several targeted bills that address aspects of our broken immigration system.
Congress crafts better policy when it is done in manageable bite sizes. In my view we do not have to look far in the past to see what happens when Congress bites off more than it can chew. Implementation of the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank offer two examples of the unintended consequences of passing giant bills with multi-thousand pages that are poorly understood. In fact, it was the 1986 comprehensive immigration bill that left us with the many problems we are attempting to fix today. Passing a series of smaller more targeted immigration bills will result in better policy and achieve better results for the American people.
Moreover, there is broad agreement within Congress on many aspects of immigration policy. Last year the House of Representatives passed two immigration bills. One would have repurposed visas from the diversity lottery to STEM visas for some of our most talented foreign-born U.S. graduates. Another would have eliminated the employment-based, green card per-country cap allowing American employers to have access to the best talent regardless of where a potential employee was born.
This bill passed 389 to 15 in the House. Yet neither received a vote in the Senate because of adherence to the approach that says we can't do anything unless we do everything. This line of thinking has prevented progress on important challenges facing our country for a long time.
Republicans and Democrats agree that creating opportunities for highly skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants to contribute to our economy is beneficial to America. I strongly hope Congress will finally come together and pass what we can agree upon now while continuing to work on the issues that divide us. In my view, we can no longer allow ourselves to be hostage to the all-or-nothing strategy or wait until after the next election.
Right now other countries are taking advantage of our inability to solve problems and are exploiting our broken immigration system. Since I arrived in the Senate in 2011, at least seven countries have changed their policies and laws to better attract highly skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants. One of those countries, Canada, even went so far as to buy a billboard in Silicon Valley in an attempt to poach the best and brightest.
We must address this problem, and the best way to do so is in a measured and incremental way. The benefits to our Nation's economy will be great and the goodwill produced by working in a bipartisan manner on targeted solutions will sow the seeds of trust necessary to solve the problems where disagreement remains.
So we will see what happens now in the immigration debate, but my hope is that if we are unable to pass so-called broad-based immigration reform, if we are unable to come up with sensible solutions in an understandable legislative package, let's at least work to accomplish those things on which there is broad agreement and continue to solve those problems where there remains disagreement today.
Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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