Immigration restrictions said to cause recent declines in US technology, innovation, entrepreneurship

Brooks Pierce friend Vivek Wadhwa believes that US immigration restrictions are creating a reverse brain drain. He says skilled innovators come to the US for education, then get frustrated with US treatment of immigrants, and go home.

Vivek has tracked US restrictions on immigrants to the surge of start-ups in China and India — and he links that surge to recent declines in the US. So, he’s got the cure:

We need to make it easy for entrepreneurs
abroad to bring start-up firms to the United
States. One solution is to provide a ‘start-up
visa’ as a path to permanent residency. This
would perhaps be valid for five years, with
an upgrade to permanent residency dependent
on the firm’s employment of US workers.
The Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City,
Missouri has estimated that such a visa
would create 1.6 million jobs within 10 years
and boost the US economy by $224 billion
a year.

This sounds like a robust response to the challenges of globalism. Vivek says:

By becoming the best place in the world for entrepreneurs to study and work in, the United States could again be in the driving seat of technology innovation. Then we can share the resulting prosperity in a more equitable way to mitigate the anger of the electorate.

MidLaw is for that.

Semicentennial visit to Spain — Visigoths seen dancing on the beach

Upon departing Spain recently, it occurred to me that I first visited there 50 years ago. Semicentennial.

The contrasts are easy to name.  Spain now is bright, colorful, spirited. It is notably prosperous compared with a half-century ago, although at this moment it is still in some stage of a bad recession.

It’s not any longer about old ladies wearing black. I saw 75 women dancing (not particularly well) on a shore, and 20 more vaulting on boots fitted with bouncing soles.

On the beaches, there are libraries. Lending libraries on the beaches.

Like 50 years ago and before, every mountain town still seems to offer some unique dish, or drink, or method of preparing pork. Every seaside village has some unique species of sea creature that they eat (or, at least, serve).

Spaniards are Iberians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Jews, Moors, Visigoths, thoroughly mixed. You can’t say that America invented immigration, or that immigration is some new thing.

I saw a sign on a public building on Spain’s East Coast that says, “Refugees Welcome.”