“This is both an excellent plan and also something I have personally experienced (if you have never dealt with the INS, it is about the worst agency in the government and that says a lot). For me personally it was a life an death fight to get and keep an H1B visa, even though I had come out of Stanford Business School, worked with Pierre Omidyar on the J-1 18 month student work visa while we built eBay from scratch…then I had to fight for and H1-B (a 3 year work visa that is usually automatically extended for an additional 3 years). In my case, when my 3 year H1-B visa was up for renewal, eBay was already a public company and I had 3000 people reporting to me. For no reason, the INS turned down my 3 year “automatic” extension meaning I would have had to leave the country and my job. It was insane but by then I hade the contacts and resources to get not only the H1-B extension but also an O-1 for “Exceptional Ability”. I fear for the many people who don’t have the resources or the ability to fight the INS. I also ran into countless problems applying for H1-B’s for eBay and my future organizations, even though the work required was very specialized in most cases and there were no domestic applicants. “Give us your tired, poor and hungry” should also include “give us your skilled, capable and hard-working”. The INS has been a nightmare for so many skilled immigrants that keep this country running. Go @elonmusk , go @DOGE …you are on to something very important here.
For example, we bring in international students to our top universities, then give them US job experience, then generally we send them back home, even when they have skills that are not readily available from local folks for important roles.
The whole system is broken, very broken.”