USCIS Launches ‘Entrepreneurs in Residence’ Initiative at Silicon Valley Summit
On February 22, 2012, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Alejandro Mayorkas met with more than 150 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, academics, and government officials at NASA Research Park in Moffett Field, California, to launch the Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR) initiative and gather information.
USCIS said that the panel discussions and breakout sessions held at the summit would inform the work of a newly formed EIR tactical team, which will “work collaboratively over the next several months to ensure that immigration pathways for foreign entrepreneurs are clear and consistent, and better reflect today’s business realities. The tactical team will identify ways to enhance USCIS policies, practices and training across a range of existing nonimmigrant visa categories used by entrepreneurs.”
Mr. Mayorkas also presented five naturalized immigrant entrepreneurs with USCIS’s “Outstanding Americans by Choice” awards. One award recipient, Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur and researcher at Duke University, said the EIR initiative cannot fix by itself the “reverse brain drain” of foreign-born entrepreneurs who receive an education in the United States and then leave to form companies in their home countries because of concerns about U.S. immigration laws and regulations. “We will now have created competitors worldwide we didn’t need to create,” he warned. A Scottish entrepreneur, Scott Allison, said at the summit that the immigration process “shouldn’t be something we have to worry about. But we do have to worry about it. I don’t know where my home is.”
Source: USCIS Announcement
