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TECHNOLOGY
Bloomberg Businessweek
October 8, 2018
as AlMasoud. The Kuwaiti’s immigration law-
yer called his Wall Street oice to tell him that
without the startup visa, which could have been
granted under a plan known as the International
Entrepreneur Rule, he had two weeks to leave the
U.S. That afternoon, AlMasoud spent hours sit-
ting by the East River, looking out at the Brooklyn
Bridge. The thought running through his mind:
How do I tell my 5-year-old daughter I failed?
As it turned out, he didn’t have to. Flair Inc.,
his inancial technology startup, incorporated
in June and is starting to hire engineers who can
develop its money-management web services for
pro athletes. It’s just not in the U.S. Flair is hiring
in Vancouver, where AlMasoud was one of the irst
people accepted to a startup visa program that
looks a lot like the fast-track plan under Barack
Obama that Trump blew up. In the past 18 months,
similar programs with a range of perks have
sprung up in at least a dozen countries, including
the U.K., China, Japan, Israel, Germany, Estonia,
Australia, and New Zealand. As with many of his
peers, the irst choice was always America, says
AlMasoud, whose startup is among 130 created by
people admitted to Canada’s new visa program
since February.
Immigrant founders and co-founders have a
strong track record in Silicon Valley (see Google,
Tesla, EBay, Stripe), as do the children of immi-
grants (Apple, Oracle,
Amazon.com). But the
Valley’s fabled Sand Hill Road is no longer the cen-
ter of the venture capital world, and as the Trump
administration continues to increase restrictions
on most forms of immigration, other locales are
even more eager than usual to frame themselves as
the next great innovation hub. Startups are doing
a lot more venue shopping than they used to, says
Merilin Lukk, who runs Estonia’s recruiting pro-
gram and has brought at least 160 founders to the
country since last year, creating about 440 jobs.
Countries have been ofering all kinds of perks
to diferentiate themselves. A new program in
Israel throws in a $20,000 relocation bonus, a local
accountant, Hebrew classes, a yearly light home,
and a paid-for cellphone. Other ofers include
low-interest loans, six-day visa processing, and,
most important, the equivalent of a green card.
“The ight over tech talent is not something that
is coming in the future. It’s happening right now,”
says Kate Mitchell, the founder of Scale Venture
Partners in Foster City, Calif. “And we are losing.”
That may be a bit of an overstatement for the
time being, but the U.S. certainly isn’t trying
to match those ofers. The Trump administra-
tion derailed the legacy Obama program a week
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PHOTOGRAPH BY DJINANE ALSUWAYEH FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
before its planned rollout last year, and although a
lawsuit by the National Venture Capital Association
managed to force the feds to eyeball a prelimi-
nary handful of applications, a spokesman for
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says the
program “does not adequately protect U.S. inves-
tors and U.S. workers” and that the agency intends
to scrap the program as soon as it has inished
reviewing public comments on the matter.
The move is part of a broader set of moves to
restrict immigration visas, including the H-1B
visas that have historically gone overwhelmingly
to tech workers. Critics of the program, including
labor advocates as well as Trump-style national-
ists, say the visas have too often been abused by
outsourcers and companies that simply want to
pay workers less. There may be some truth to that:
More than 50 percent of the country’s working
science and engineering Ph.D.s are foreign-born.
But another way to look at those numbers is that
America needs immigrants.
Canada is one of many countries that seem less
conlicted, says AlMasoud, who’s enjoying his
AlMasoud joined
Canada’s visa
program instead