Smooth start-ups for success
08 January 2010
A rather predictable step in the evolution of the ‘global village’ is being proposed by a group in Silicon Valley.
Despite being built on relatively modern immigrants (unlike everywhere else that is built on ancient migrants except Africa and possibly, some now suggest, China), America is not above everyone else when it comes to a bit of self-interest. We are sufficiently far down the road of globalisation for the journey ahead to be both inevitable and irreversible. There will come a point I imagine when the only boundaries that people must not cross are those purchased by an individual’s wealth, but national borders will become a thing of the past.
But that is a long way off and before we get there we will slowly have to break down all of the reasons why someone should want to live in a different country from their own i.e. imbalances in food supply, shelter, income, opportunity etc. Countries like America have been very concerned about immigrants coming in and taking their jobs, the welfare resource, the women – or what ever it is that immigrants are meant to immorally do – and so put in as many rules as possible to restrict the migration to their shores.
What a group in Silicon Valley has realised is that such measures are potentially damaging to the overall prospects for the technology sector in the region. The founder, Visa group, originally proposed last spring by technology entrepreneur Paul Graham, is an internet-based campaign group that proposes that science graduates can remain in the US after they graduate with a ‘start-up visa’. They can then start-up companies, inspired by their locally gained technology degrees, that will have benefit the local economy and employment prospects while progressing the technology sector. Currently graduates can only remain in the US if they are ‘sponsored’ by a company, and are by definition not starting anything up, or have half a million dollars to invest in a new company. Such investment might have been commonplace in the past when America was a principal geography – but now the manufacturing and design has migrated to most other parts of the globe America can no longer automatically command such investment.
The scheme has gathered some steam over the latter half of 2009 but presumably it still needs to wait its turn in the legislative pecking order – I believe there may some items like Afghanistan and health insurance that might be congesting the system.
America is, incidentally, only an example. I am sure similar restrictions, and opportunities, exist in all of the traditional industrial nations. I have banged on about the importance of education in this column before, and also the need for investment in R&D, but maybe there are a few more obvious, unnecessary and easy to remove obstacles to industrial progress that some nations could look out for, and maybe this is one of them.
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