Our Venture Unfriendly Immigration Policy
Imagine doing the due diligence in a company whose tech team is in Eastern Europe—Belarus to be specific. It’s a small country with a strong STEM education system that you honestly don’t know that much about. As you do your work, what you hear makes you nervous: a government that concentrates power in one leader, protests that are met with military force, sudden changes in rules that businesses have to scramble to follow.
At any moment, your US team visiting the country to collaborate could be picked up off the street for not having the right papers and detained indefinitely. Licenses to operate could be revoked if anyone speaks against the government.
You wonder how anyone could trust building something durable in that environment and decide to pull back your offer.
I’d ask how long before people start to think of the United States that way, but we’re already here.
How excited do you think foreign companies are going to be to invest into US operations after ICE stormed a Hyundai/LG battery plant construction site in Georgia and detained nearly 500 foreign workers?
Many of them were skilled South Korean technicians brought in to install and validate specialized equipment. The raid has delayed the plant’s opening by months and disrupted a project expected to create 8,500 U.S. jobs.
Just last week, an unexpected new $100,000 H-1B fee was announced and confusion spread instantly through the tech sector. The H-1B program is a U.S. visa that allows employers to hire highly skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations like technology, engineering, and medicine when they can’t find enough qualified Americans.
Big employers scrambled to brief their people, immigration lawyers worked overtime, and H-1B holders abroad rushed to change flights and get back into the U.S. before the cutoff. At first, no one knew if it applied to renewals or just new petitions. Even with clarifications, companies and employees were left second-guessing how safe their status really was.
It was costly chaos for a lot of hardworking people in some of the most innovative parts of the economy.
Startups thrive on talent. Not just any talent—hardworking, ambitious people willing to take big risks, move across borders, and build new lives around new ideas. Immigrants have founded over half of America’s most valuable startups. Entire categories of innovation—semiconductors, biotech, AI—are led by people who weren’t born here but chose here.
Raids send a chilling message: you’re not welcome, even if you’re working hard.
Drastic policy shifts make it hard for anyone to consider actually investing in a life here. If you can’t travel on business without wondering if your status is going to be revoked mid-flight, what are the chances you’re going to make the US the headquarters of your next business? The world is competing for entrepreneurial talent. Canada, the UK, Singapore—all are rolling out welcome mats.
We cannot afford to lose these people by scaring them off as an immigrant unfriendly nation.
“New American” (immigrants or children of immigrants) founders account for ~46% of the 2025 Fortune 500 companies. These 231 companies generated $8.6 trillion in revenue.
Over 40% of US unicorn founders are foreign-born.
Of the companies in the Forbes “AI 50” list, 60% were founded by immigrants. They’re making the US a global AI leader.
If we slam the door, the next generation of groundbreaking companies won’t be built in Silicon Valley or New York. They’ll be built somewhere else.
If you want to argue that we should be supporting policies that make Americans the greatest engineers and scientists in the world, eliminating the need to bring people in from elsewhere, I’m all ears.
Make it so that you can study computer science and biology for free in a completely supported way—starting with breakfast and lunch in your stomach when you’re a kid and without student debt when you’re in college.
Go for it.
Make it so that more people are free to start companies because their healthcare and their work status aren’t shackled to stodgy old companies that aren’t going anywhere—so that they’re free to turn their nights and weekends ideas into the next big IPO.
Until then, we need people to feel safe and supported coming here to work on new innovations.
What drives me nuts is that the same VCs that support this administration know this.
Back in 2016, one VC noted that “The Valley wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be doing any of this if we didn’t have the amazing flow of immigrants that we’ve had in the last 80 years… And the idea of choking that off just makes me sick to my stomach.”
That was Marc Andreessen.
What happened to 2016 Marc? I know he doesn’t like AI and crypto regulation, but did he suddenly decide that innovation can survive here if the smartest people from around the world don’t feel safe coming here and planting roots?
Who has “time to build” when you’re on your heels trying to figure out sudden, chaotically rolled out changes to H-1B policy and your next generation battery plant is being raided by ICE?
You can’t demand more innovation while choking off the talent pipeline it takes to build.