Republicans and Democrats in both the US Senate and the House of Representatives are currently working together on broad reform bills to fix the many broken elements of America's immigration system. As America's innovation leaders, we believe that recruiting and retaining the world's top innovators and entrepreneurs must be part of any immigration reform effort. So we join together in this virtual march to ensure that we:
- Drive new business creation by providing visas to entrepreneurs who want to come to America to start businesses and create jobs. Countries like Canada, UK, Australia, Chile, and Singapore give visas and roll out the red carpet for entrepreneurs. We turn them away.
- Attract and retain talented workers and entrepreneurs our economy needs by creating a viable pathway for high-skilled workers and entrepreneurs to come here when our companies need them, and a path to citizenship to bring more talented workers into the economy. Our current system allocates far too few visas for temporary high skilled workers and entrepreneurs even in slow economic times, sets up expensive and complicated application procedures that stand in the way of obtaining the workers our companies and our economy need to compete and grow, and acts as an obstacle to millions of immigrants who cannot participate fully in the economy because they are denied citizenship.
- Power our innovation and entrepreneur-driven economy by granting permanent residency to the world's leading entrepreneurs and graduates in science, engineering, technology, and math who receive advanced degrees from U.S. universities. We currently train many of the world's leading entrepreneurs and innovators in our universities only to send them abroad to compete against us.
- Seize the moment and reform our laws. There has been no substantive reform of our immigration laws since 1965. Immigration has been treated as a political football rather than a serious policy issue requiring reasoned debate. Now is the time for change. We march to ensure that the broad immigration bills being considered in Congress include provisions to boost innovation and entrepreneurship, and we march to seize the moment and get immigration reform passed.