NET RESULTS:Don't bother with – even exclude – people who might be coming in to fill only service or other less skilled jobs, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
OPEN IRELAND, initiated in April by entrepreneur (and current Dragons’ Den dragon on RTÉ) Seán O’Sullivan, has some laudable and important aims.
Among them are to change Ireland’s visa system to create a “tech visa” that would make it easier to bring in highly skilled workers for the technology sector; to encourage foreign entrepreneurship; and to give foreign students who come into Irish universities the ability to remain here easily, to work and perhaps eventually found companies.
Overhauling the visa process to provide needed skills and to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship is not a new idea. Many technology companies and entrepreneurs have raised these issues over the years. All of these aims were key suggestions of the last government’s Innovation Ireland Taskforce, highlighted in its report early in 2010.
I’ve argued for these changes in several columns for this newspaper, the first dating to 2006. But few seem to listen, and if Open Ireland can focus Government minds on Ireland’s cumbersome visa system, more power to it.
A responsive, enabling visa system would be a major competitive advantage. The evidence is indisputable. Several studies in the US have highlighted how important immigrants are to innovation and the economy. For example, more than half of Silicon Valley companies have at least one foreign-born founder.
According to a 2007 study by the National Venture Capital Association, one in four US venture-backed companies founded since 1990 has had at least one immigrant founder. Almost half of those founders arrived as students, not as adults or skilled graduates looking to fill jobs.
This point meshes with an argument made at the recent Euroscience Open Forum conference in Dublin by Burton Lee, an engineering lecturer at Stanford University and a member of the innovation taskforce. He noted that the majority of new companies coming out of US universities are founded by students, not academics or researchers. Enabling students to come to Ireland to study and then stay therefore makes solid sense.
What doesn’t make sense to me, though, is the argument O’Sullivan put forward last weekend that this visa policy should be half-open. Don’t bother with – even exclude – people who might be coming in to fill only service or other less skilled jobs. The Government should focus on “high-value economic immigrants” (oddly also identified as those who are “English-speaking” – after all, Silicon Valley companies regularly take in people with poor English skills).
This ignores the fact that it is not just first-generation immigrants who innovate. Regularly it is their children who create companies and jobs – children such as Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang, whose parents were economic migrants.
“Few of the immigrant entrepreneurs identified came to the US ready to start a company capable of attracting venture capital . . . Most entered the country either as children, teenagers or graduate students, or were hired on H-1B [non-immigrant] visas to begin a first job while in their mid-20s,” the NVCA study said.
O’Sullivan’s proposal also flies in the face of the Irish experience in the US, where Irish emigrants from diverse backgrounds created companies and jobs over the decades, as did their children. It also ignores surveys that show many immigrants to Ireland are highly skilled people – many of them graduates or professionals – shunted into service work, unable to realise their potential.
Prioritising the highly skilled also doesn’t fit with another one of the top three goals highlighted by Open Ireland: doubling Ireland’s population. Setting aside the principal issue of whether this is a feasible or good idea (and I think it is bizarre), restrictive immigration policies will stymie that from the start.
We would need an extraordinary growth engine to create jobs for all those people – a magic recipe no one else appears to have discovered yet, not even the tech immigrant entrepreneurs in the US, who have created about 400,000 jobs, including overseas jobs, according to the NVCA report. We need people of all abilities, as well as a renewed focus on reskilling our unemployed.
Open Ireland also recommends a singular focus on China. Clearly, great opportunities would come from deeper and broader relationships with China – in Silicon Valley, Chinese founders are second only to Indians.
Yet a study published last December by the US National Foundation for American Policy noted the most common country for an immigrant founder in the top 50 venture-backed US companies was India, followed by Israel, Canada, Iran and New Zealand. Not one came from China.
I don’t think we should be prioritising any one international relationship. Let’s put energy instead into making Ireland attractive and accessible to all nationalities. Let’s not make the mistake of assuming people with skills needed by one sector are more desirable than the diverse talent available from a broad and truly open immigration policy.
