The recent H-1B visa fee hikes aren’t just policy changes, they’re serious impediments to innovation that will chip away at the foundation that built Silicon Valley’s global leadership.
America has the world’s largest economy and is a world leader in innovation because it attracts and retains the world’s best talent to work on small, high-risk startups that one day blossom into large-cap economic titan. Almost 50% of US companies above $1 billion in valuation have one co-founder who is an immigrant. Uber’s co-founder Garrett Camp is a Canadian immigrant. Elon Musk used the H-1B as a South African immigrant to build Tesla and SpaceX. Eric Yuan was famously rejected eight times for his H-1B to work at Cisco — he then went on to start Zoom, a company that dissolves borders between nations.
