Imagine you’re the CEO of a new technology startup. You have a great idea, funds in the bank, and your foot on the gas pedal. The thing that is most likely keeping you up at night is whether you’ll be able to hire technical talent quickly enough to stay ahead of your competition.
For an early-stage company, months lost searching for an engineer can be a fatal blow—and the ripple effects of this talent squeeze are felt across the technology industry and broader U.S. economy.
About 60,000 computer science majors will graduate every year in the U.S. (that number is growing roughly 10% per year) and have well over a million open software developer jobs to choose from. Despite the recent news of tech layoffs, the industry’s unemployment rate remains extremely low, hovering around 1.5% to 2%. The math becomes very simple: Our homegrown talent pool cannot keep up with the pace of growth in tech.
There is an obvious solution to this problem. Globally, there is no shortage of tech workers—and many of them want to come work in the U.S. In recent years, China and India have both surpassed the U.S. in number of developers, but Indian-born engineers have to wait up to seven years for a visa. American companies now submit hundreds of thousands of H1-B visa applications on behalf of employees every year, yet we haven’t increased the number of visas granted (85,000) in the last two decades.
Despite the clear need, our government is preventing untold numbers of talented individuals (many of whom attended American universities) from settling here and contributing to our economy.
Two very different immigration issues are being tied together in Congress. Illegal immigration (which often happens at the border) is political kryptonite in this country. Public opinion has only intensified on the issue in recent months, and Republicans are holding up the passage of any bipartisan immigration legislation (most recently, the Citizenship Act of 2023 introduced by Rep. Linda Sanchez) that doesn’t explicitly tighten restrictions across the board. The problem is that all immigration-related legislation gets wrapped up in one politically-explosive bill. Measures to expand H1-B visas and green cards for highly-educated individuals are buried within broader migration and border-control bills that remain stuck in a purgatorial gridlock.
Congress may be blocking highly-skilled immigrants from moving to the U.S., but that isn’t stopping them from taking American jobs. Fueled by a need for talent and aided by the rise in remote work, American companies are increasingly moving technical jobs offshore.
If we kept those jobs in the U.S., our nation would have a lot to gain. In the very short term, we’d contribute to GNP and tax revenue. In the long-term, some of those talented engineers will inevitably start multi-billion dollar companies. And instead of building them here, adding thousands of jobs to our economy and billions of dollars of market cap to our public exchanges, they’re going to create those companies in France, in India, in Africa. Everywhere but the U.S.
In sports, we don’t hesitate to welcome all-stars. The NBA is the best sports league in the world, in part because the world’s top players are granted visas to play in the U.S. The last three league MVPs have been foreign-born. We want the same thing in technology: for the world’s best technical programmers and founders to innovate and build in the U.S.
Immigrant leaders have created and grown companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Uber, Tesla, Nvidia, Ebay, Yahoo, Stripe, and Databricks, which all have foreign-born founders or CEOs. There are hundreds more examples: Almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, and a staggering 80% of current U.S.-based unicorn startups were either cofounded by immigrants or have an immigrant in a key leadership role like CEO or VP of engineering, according to the National Foundation for American Policy.
The young, prodigious programmers of today are the unicorn CEOs of tomorrow. Why wouldn’t we welcome them?
I experience this firsthand as a tech founder and investor. At AlleyCorp, a New-York based venture capital firm I founded, we incubate eight new startups each year. In 2020, we decided to start AlleyCorp Nord, an in-house engineering company based in Montreal that employs dedicated engineers for our startups to help them get to market fast. Why Canada? Because their immigration policies are significantly friendlier than ours—it’s much easier to get a work visa, and there’s a faster path to permanent residence, with no per-country limits.
When I walk into our office in Montreal, almost half of the team is foreign-born—and now almost a quarter of the entire Canadian population are immigrants. Canada is opening their doors to sought-after talent (and as of July, to H-1B visa holders in the U.S.), and they will reap the rewards.
This isn’t just an economic issue. In 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS Act to bolster semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., which has deteriorated significantly in the past few decades. Chips are the foundation of all technological innovation: from cars to smartphones to fighter jets to MRI machines. Micron, headquartered in Idaho, is committed to spending up to $100 billion to build chip plants in upstate New York. But you need to have the right people to do that—and without highly-skilled immigrants, we simply will not.
This is a matter of national security: If we cannot build chips in the U.S., we could be vulnerable to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and catastrophic disruptions to our supply chain.
Only good policy can solve this problem. While the left is broadly in favor of expanding access to H1-B visas, we’re lacking leadership in Washington that is bold enough to cut through today’s political noise and champion controlled, legal immigration.
Immigration has been the strength of the United States for over 200 years. Now, it will be the key to our survival on an increasingly competitive global stage.
Kevin Ryan, often called the “Godfather of New York City tech,” is the founder and CEO of AlleyCorp, which founds and invests in early-stage technology companies. AlleyCorp has founded companies including MongoDB, Business Insider, Zola, Nomad Health, and Transcend Therapeutics.
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