Salmon: The No-Brainer Immigrant-Entrepreneur Visa
I don't have an opinion on the rest of the bill, but it does have two sections that are something of a no-brainer when it comes to immigration reform. One is the immigrant-entrepreneur visa; the second is the idea of giving green cards to up to 50,000 foreign students who graduate from an American university with an advanced degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics -- so long as they remain in that field for five consecutive years.
The immigrant-entrepreneur visa is pretty simple. You create a pool of 75,000 such things, available to anybody who's here already on an H1-B or F-1 visa. When those people switch from their old visa to their new one, they have to start a new company; employ at least two full-time, non-family member employees "at a rate comparable to the median income of employees in the region", and invest or raise at least $100,000.
After that, they have to continue adding employees at a rate of one per year, so that after three years, there must be at least five employees. At the end of three years, you graduate to a green card, and with it the standard path to citizenship.
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The visa addresses the main problem that Ross Eisenbrey has with H1-B visas: the fact that people on such visas are "more or less indentured, tied to their job and whatever wage the employer decides to give them." The new visa would create an employer exit strategy for H1-Bs, allowing workers to leave companies that pay too little or offer too few opportunities, and instead strike out on their own.
And of course -- by definition -- it would create jobs. The Kauffman foundation's math is solid, here: They conservatively estimate job creation at somewhere between 500,000 and 1.6 million new jobs after 10 years, and possibly substantially more. (Those estimates don't include jobs created by the new firms after they've left the program, for instance.)