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u.s. immigration<br />

Should highly skilled international<br />

students (including Bachelors,<br />

Masters, Doctorate) be given<br />

Green Cards?<br />

Craig Montuori, Study it, live it, and love it.<br />

The short answer is yes. Yes, we should grant more highlyskilled,<br />

highly-educated immigrants green cards.<br />

For purely selfish American reasons, the answer is yes.<br />

Highly skilled immigrants are productive, net-positive members<br />

of American society, just like highly skilled Americans.<br />

This country has a certain median production per capita, and<br />

anything that increases that median means more economic<br />

growth for America. More economic growth means more and<br />

better opportunities for native-born Americans.<br />

Take Amit Aharoni as an example; Israeli-born, Stanford<br />

GSB-education, StartupChile alumnus. By november '11,<br />

through his company Cruisewise, he had created nine jobs<br />

held by Americans in San Francisco, had raised over $1.6M in<br />

funding. His visa rejected, Amit left for Canada, continuing<br />

to run his SF-based company from Vancouver via Skype. ABC<br />

picked up his story and boom, Amit got a visa. Amit's Cruisewise<br />

is now up to sixteen employees in SF as the company<br />

continues to grow and prosper.<br />

I'll leave the pure statistics to folks like the Kauffman<br />

Foundation or Vivek Wadhwa, but this set of immigrants<br />

contribute much more to America than they consume. By<br />

partnering with Americans to found and grow jobs-creating<br />

companies, the country benefits from their success. With a<br />

single missing founder — like elon Musk of South Africa —<br />

PayPal might not have succeeded and grown into the success<br />

story it has.<br />

Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook told a story last August<br />

about an extremely skilled developer from the UK. His visa<br />

application was denied, and since the developer was so talented,<br />

Facebook simply hired a team of ten in the UK to support<br />

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