There are two key problems that require immediate remediation in Congress, according to the coalition of companies, politicians, and nonprofits: jobs and fairness.

“Our outdated immigration system is costing our economy talent, jobs, and innovation, not to mention the toll it’s taking on families and potential immigrants,” the organization says. “America can’t afford to fall behind in the race for global talent — a race we’re already losing. Already, other countries have incentivized innovation and encouraged startups while we make it difficult for talented immigrants to even apply for a visa.”

That sounds like a reference to Canada, which recently created a “startup visa” that gives immigrants who are founding companies instant permanent residency and had its minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, visit Silicon Valley to drum up applicants who might be having trouble staying in the U.S.

The result could be a net drain on the American economy:

Holy crap! @alexisohanian ‘s mom was an illegal immigrant. If she had been deported? No #reddit for the USA. That’s why #iMarch #latism

— AnaRC (@AnaRC) May 22, 2013

When I chatted with Kenney last week, he called the U.S. immigration system “dysfunctional.”

The U.S. has made attempts to address the situation with a Startup Act of its own, but even that would only allow founders to stay for up to three years. The March for Innovation is looking for much more comprehensive reform that would include help for undocumented immigrants already in the country.

March for Immigration is supported by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Steve Case, Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, and numerous other business and technology leaders.

If you’re interested in participating, here are four things you can do to help:

1. Tweet or Facebook your senator
2. Spread the word on Twitter or Facebook
3. Change your Facebook profile picture to iMarch
4. Email your friends

The ultimate goal is immigration reform that supports innovation and delivers on the promise at the feet of the Statue of Liberty.

photo credit: gerson721 via photopin cc

As research indicates that the U.S. is an increasingly difficult place for foreign founders to come and build companies and founders tell horror stories of the massive challenges they faced dealing with byzantine U.S. immigration policies, Canada is burnishing its reputation as open for business — and open for new residents.

Canada’s new startup visa has received a huge amount of attention in the U.S. as the the global war for talent heats up. Senators such as Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) have tried to address the situation via legislation like the Startup Act 3.0, but that’s a slim hope after deaths of 1.0 and 2.0.

Source: Wikipedia

Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism.

The Startup Visa provides immediate permanent residency in Canada if a founder meets just three criteria. An applicant must:

1. Secure an investment from a designated Canadian VC or fund
2. Demonstrate English language proficiency
3. Have at least one year of postsecondary education

This weekend, Canadian member of parliament and Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney is in Silicon Valley promoting his country’s Startup Visa.

We chatted with Kenney about the visa’s goals, his intentions, and the U.S. immigration system.

VentureBeat: What’s the ultimate goal of the Startup Visa?

Jason Kenney: We want a pathway for the world’s best and brightest to come to Canada and to harness that drive and innovation to be at the cutting edge of the modern economy.

VentureBeat: Why are you coming to Silicon Valley right now?

Kenney: The U.S. immigration system is dysfunctional, and it’s really difficult for talented immigrants to stay in the U.S. permanently. I’m coming to further raise the profile of the program and send the message that Canada’s open for business.

If you’re a young startup entrepreneur having trouble renewing your visa, come here! We offer immediate permanent residency.

VentureBeat: What’s the response been so far?

Kenney: There’s been a great amount of interest, but we only opened for applications on April 4, so it’s too early to tell. We will issue up to 2,500 per year, but I don’t anticipate it will be fully subscribed for the first year because it’s still new.

I know there’s a huge pent-up demand in the U.S., and I think the word is going to spread virally: If you want to stay permanently in NA, think of Canada.

VentureBeat: You’re offering permanent residency to anyone in who secures an investment. What about those who fail?

Kenney: Many countries, such as Australia, only offer temporary resident status. In Canada, we’re going to give you the “green card” right up front.

We know full well the rate of failure in startups is high, but if they come up here and don’t succeed, they have demonstrated they they have high human capital. And in the long run, their chances of succeeding and building a successful enterprise are high.

We want Canada to become a magnet for people like that.

VentureBeat: Why is Canada a good place to come build a startup?

Kenney: We have really strong tech sectors in Kitchener/Waterloo, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and a few other places, an increasingly strong venture capital industry, and very well-run industry associations, angel associations.

Plus, we have the lowest business taxes in the developed world, and the strongest fiscal position in the developed world.

In terms of macro-economic terms, that’s important … Canada weathered the storm of the economic downturn better than any other country.

In addition, we have an immigration system that works, which means you have access to global talent … and human capital is even more important than financial capital.

VentureBeat: Any other message for Silicon Valley?

Kenney: While here we’ll be meeting with the CEOs of many major IT companies just to emphasize what a great place Canada is to invest in.

I think we’re really going to kick this into hyperdrive.

photo credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE via photopin cc

Except, of course, at a hockey game. And, increasingly, in Ontario, where startups, government, industry, universities, angels, and venture capitalists are working aggressively to try to create the world’s leading technology hub.

Source: John Koetsier

Inside Waterloo, Ontario’s new $160M center for quantum computing.

“We want the world’s next biggest tech company to be built in Ontario,” the most populous Canadian province’s minister of research and innovation, Reza Moridi, told a small group of journalists recently in Toronto.

That’s aggression — even if spoken in a kinder, gentler way by an urbane, mild-mannered politician.

It also might strike some as hubris, given that Ontario’s biggest technology story to date is that of a dying smartphone manufacturer, BlackBerry (formerly known as Research In Motion).

But it’s not just words, and it’s not just the government that’s behind this effort.

Ontario’s reverse brain drain

Ontario is home to about 40 percent of Canada’s population and accounts for 48 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product. It’s the fourth-largest population center in North America, after Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles, and it produces more cars than any other region in North America, including Michigan. Ontario also has the Americas’ second-biggest financial services sector, after New York.

More to the point, it’s North America’s second-leading cluster for technology companies, after California, and has the third-largest concentration of life sciences companies on the continent.

Source: John Koetsier

Google bought local startup BufferBox in late 2012

The government has invested $3.6 billion in those sectors, primarily, over the last decade, with two-thirds going to research and development, and one-third focused on building the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

That money has had an impact.

For years, countries like Canada and the U.K. have complained about a brain drain, with the best talent heading stateside for more options and better pay. Not anymore. In fact, quite the reverse.

“My co-founder left Silicon Valley to come here,” Cream.hr CEO Kateline McGregor told me.

She’s starting her company at Communitech, a thriving, almost frenetic community of startups, accelerators, massive technology companies, students, and coworkers in Waterloo, Ontario. An hour’s drive up the 401 from Toronto, Waterloo is a city of 98,000 that saw more than 500 startups take root in 2012. And the massive burst of innovation has not gone unnoticed.

“Something very interesting is happening here,” Google’s top Canadian employee, Steve Woods, told me. “This area has a very high proportion of startups to population. Google loves startups … and we love to hire entrepreneurial people.”

Woods himself is a Silicon Valley refugee, returning home to Canada after building several companies in the Valley. Google recruited him over the course of several years to lead its Canadian operations.

He points directly to U.S. immigration policies that pose a critical problem for both startups and large, wealthy corporations such as Google. Getting into the U.S. to build a company or join a startup is notoriously difficult and expensive.

Where Woods works: This Google office has a real fireman’s pole, slide, cattle walkway, and more (gallery)

Meanwhile, Canada has just recently taken even more steps — such as the Startup Visa — to make it simpler, quicker, and cheaper to come to Canada.

“Because of visa situations, Canada has received a disproportionate amount of the talent that is coming into North America,” Woods said.

All of that translates into a significant competitive advantage for Canadian startups and tech companies.

More education, more startups

Another competitive advantage, particularly in the Waterloo region, is the constant stream of high-quality students coming out of engineering, math, and computer science schools. I heard this ad nauseam from government representatives I met with, and credible sources in the industry confirmed it.

Source: John Koetsier

University of Waterloo students build startups at Velocity Garage, a for-credit accelerator-like program.

“Waterloo University produces an amazing kind of talent,” Woods told me. “It gives students a great grounding in computer science, but also by the time they graduate they’ve passed through four summers of co-op programs, so they’ve worked at Facebook, at Google, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or other companies.”

Ontario’s 44 universities produce about 30,000 computer science and engineering graduates each year, a steady flow of new talent for the province’s startups as well as established IT, life sciences, and aerospace companies.

By contrast, California — a state with about three times the population of Ontario — produces only 21,000 STEM graduates per year. The results are clear, at least for Woods.

“People that come into Google from the University of Waterloo do disproportionately well,” Woods says.

Source: John Koetsier

One of the meeting rooms at Communitech, a startup mecca in Waterloo, Ontario. Google also has an office here.

Rob Crowe, executive-in-residence for Waterloo-based Institute for Quantum Computing, the second-largest quantum computing research center in the world, agrees.  And he points out another advantage that translates to more startups coming out of key Canadian universities.

According to Crowe, a key difference between the U.S. and Canada is that many Canadian universities have followed the European model of education-funded research and development. Essentially, professors and researchers at the University of Waterloo own any intellectual property they develop, not the institution they work and teach for. That’s an incentive for academics to put their best foot forward while on faculty, and to kickstart companies when their ideas result in a viable product or company.

“This is the university that throws off more startups than any other university in the country,” Crowe told me.

Less tax, more benefits, more investment

All of the above regional traits are excellent for students, researchers, and startups, but there’s also good news for investors. Moridi’s ministry of research and innovation has helped reduce corporate tax, while also providing significant tax credits for companies doing innovative work.

“Ontario has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in North America, at 22 percent,” says John Marshall, president and CEO of the Ontario Capital Growth Corp., Ontario’s voice in two venture funds totaling about $500 million. The funds were raised partially by government, which recently announced intentions to pump in another $50 million, but mostly by venture capitalists and institutional investors.

Source: John Koetsier

Google has invested significantly in Waterloo, Ontario, hiring 200 engineers for its Canadian engineering headquarters.

The goal is simple: Invest in potential high-growth venture-stage startups in Ontario via a fund-of-funds approach that ensures industry participation and leadership in every specific investment. In other words, Marshall puts money into funds assembled by local VCs such as Omers, Northleaf Capital Partners, and Rho Canada. Those VCs in turn drive the actual investments into companies like Shopify, Desire2Learn (which recently closed an $80 million round), Polar Mobile, and BlueCat Networks.

“Our overall aim is to build the ecosystem for innovation,” Marshall says. “That includes the demand side, with accelerators and startups, and the supply side: seed funding, angel investors, and venture capitalists.”

The fund-of-funds strategy appears to be working. Two years ago the average fund size in Canada was $60 million, compared to $180 million in the U.S., but now the average Canadian VC fund is $90 million. Other venture entities, such as Intel Capital and Samsung Venture Investment, are following the money and making their own investments.

When that money gets into the hands of actual startups, it goes further, according to the companies I talked to. The reason is Canada’s federal and provincial research and development credits, which the Ontario government says are “among the most generous of the OECD countries.”

Source: John Koetsier

Ontario had 500 startups in 2012 in Waterloo alone.

Taken as a whole, those credits can reduce the after-tax cost of $100 worth of R&D to just $57 for corporations and just $39 for startups.

Fixmo CEO Rick Segal, an ex-patriate American, says those tax credits are one of the key reasons he chose Toronto as the location for his latest mobile security startup. The CEO of online advertising startup Chango, Chris Sukornyk, told me the same thing.

Marshall says that the credits simply add on to a startup environment that has long stretched every single dollar as far as it can go.

“Our entrepreneurs have already been so capital efficient by necessity,” he says, adding that now that Ontario’s entrepreneurs have access to more money, they’re still using it wisely.

That capital is starting to flow more freely lately, with VC investment up in Ontario in the past few years. But startups, who benefit most from the R&D tax credits, also have additional benefits. Almost every startup that graduates from a major Canadian accelerator such as Hyperdrive and Extreme Startups in Ontario, FounderFuel in Montréal, and GrowLabs in Vancouver, gets offered a $500,000 convertible note by the Business Development Bank of Canada.

That’s cheap and none-dilutive money, and provides more runway for startups. Most of which, realistically, need more than a three-month stint in an accelerator program to become real companies.

Ambition, meet reality

There’s no doubt that Ontario is taking smart steps with the ultimate goal of dominating the business of technology. But can it really out-innovate the innovation capital of the world, Silicon Valley?

Toronto currently ranks eighth on the Startup Genome’s list of global startup ecosystems, just above another Canadian technology hub, Vancouver. Tiny Waterloo ranks 16th with its population of just under 100,000, bringing to mind Tel Aviv, the super-fertile startup ecosystem of 400,000 people that currently holds third place.

Source: John Koetsier

Toronto’s CN Tower

In addition, Ontario officials quietly let me know that they believe Ottawa would have won a spot in the top 20 as well, if Startup Genome had analyzed the data just a bit differently. That would, of course, have given Ontario three cities in the global top 20.

But even considering the province’s leading contender, there’s still a long way between eighth and first. And every country in the world, seemingly, wants to follow the Silicon Valley model to the yellow brick road of employment and riches.

Few succeed.

VC investment in Canada overall is still just a fraction of that in the U.S., with about $1.5 billion invested in the entire country over all sectors in 2012, compared to $8.3 billion invested in the U.S.  in software alone, and another $6.7 billion just in web-based startups. In Ontario specifically, VC investment was just $603 million, compared to California’s U.S.-leading $14.1 billion.

And RIM, with revenues of $18 billion in fiscal 2012 dropping to $11.1 billion in fiscal 2013, is still probably the province’s biggest tech company.

That’s not a good sign.

Turning to BlackBerry for inspiration

Despite the small numbers, startups are increasingly choosing Ontario as home. Taxation and immigration policies as well as investments from blue-chip funds like Union Square and Kleiner Perkins are having a massive cumulative effect.

Even BlackBerry is feeding the culture of innovation in Ontario, despite being in what are perhaps its death throes.

Fixmo CEO Segal says BlackBerry has been an amazing influence in Ontario, and continues to be influential. “There are lots of alumni from RIM, both voluntary and involuntary,” he says with a wry grin.

Marshall says the growth of BlackBerry from nothing to its heights as the first key innovator of the smartphone revolution has had its own impact, regardless of the company’s current situation.

“Now you’ve got kids coming up who saw their parents do it,” he says. “So they believe they can do it too.”

500 new startups in Waterloo in 2012 alone attest to that fact.

In the against-all-odds world of the startup, belief is the key ingredient of success.

Image credits: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Ontario’s ministry of economic development invited VentureBeat to visit the province, and paid my expenses. My reporting, however, remains my own.

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This is a guest post by Boris Wertz

On Thursday, March 28, Canada announced that a new startup visa program would begin accepting applications.

Governments can be notorious for slow change, especially in the eyes of entrepreneurs who move at an incredibly fast-pace. But Canada’s federal government moved impressively quickly to implement this new visa, which is aimed at encouraging entrepreneurs from all over the globe to call us home.

What does the startup visa accomplish?

Immigrants — who are 30 percent more likely to start a business than non-immigrants, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration – can now be fast-tracked into Canada if they receive a $200,000 investment from a designated Canadian venture capital fund or $75,000 from a designated Canadian angel investor group. This makes it much easier for entrepreneurs to avoid bureaucratic red tape and the stress of immigration status uncertainty.

But the program doesn’t just make it easier for immigrants on a financial level. It makes it easier on a volume level as well. In 2012, a mere 700 of the old startup visas were issued, while the new program has carved a path for up to 2,750 entrepreneurs to launch their startups in Canada per year.

While the Canadian government is garnering praise for making the visa a reality, the truth is that in order for the program to come to fruition, everyone had to make it a priority: government, investors, and entrepreneurs worked together for two years to make things happen. Everyone, to use startup terminology, hustled.

How Summify provided the impetus for Canada’s startup visa

But what started it all? To find the answer, look no further than a Canadian startup success story: Summify. Romanian founders Mircea Paşoi and Cristian Strat overcame everything that was wrong with Canada’s old system, creating a popular company that was acquired by Twitter for a tidy sum in January 2012.

Summify’s founders came to Canada in 2010 to start their company and were quickly backed by top-tier venture capital. Yet Paşoi and Strat — who turned down Silicon Valley jobs at Facebook and Google to build a company in Canada — could only get six-month visas, forcing them to leave and return to the country repeatedly.

They also weren’t allowed to work for their own company because the old immigration law book considered the two entrepreneurs to be potential drains on Canadian society, even though the opposite was evidently true: Summify was creating jobs in Canada and attracting significant investment.

It was their story of frustration and adversity that inspired me and other Vancouver-based entrepreneurs Danny Robinson (co-founder of Perch) and Maura Rodgers (co-founder of Strutta) to lobby for an easier way for foreign technology entrepreneurs to start their company in Canada. Fortunately for us, the government expressed strong interest to push our initiative forward.

A startup visa for the U.S.?

So now you’re wondering, what about the U.S.? Where is its startup visa? And how did Canada — a smaller nation with a less established technology ecosystem — beat its neighbor to the South on this front?

It would be easy to argue that the U.S. doesn’t need any help attracting entrepreneurs. It has Silicon Valley, which was ranked by Startup Genome as (to no one’s surprise) the world’s best startup ecosystem. Entrepreneurs from every corner of the planet are naturally drawn to the Valley. But to make that argument would be to go against the very nature which made the Valley so successful: if the US sits back and watches other countries implement startup-friendly visa programs, it’s going to get left in the dust — just like when a big company is disrupted by a scrappy startup.

Startupvisa.com, a site dedicated to raising awareness about the situation, contends that U.S. immigration policies are “now hurting our competitive edge in the global economy.”

Last year, four of the world’s five top-ranked startup ecosystems were American cities. But Canada has two cities in the top 10 (Vancouver and Toronto) and a third in the top 20 (Waterloo). If Canada continues to beat the US to the punch on important issues such as these, it won’t be long before the tables are turned.

The importance of foreign entrepreneurs building their companies in the US cannot be underestimated. Few realize that nearly half of Silicon Valley startups are founded by immigrants. Without them, the Valley would not be the world-leading startup ecosystem that it is today.

But there’s a problem — this trend is reversing. From 1995 to 2005, foreign entrepreneurs founded 52 percent of Valley startups, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Yet since then, they’ve founded just 44 percent. A startup visa would get immigrant entrepreneurship back on track and allow Silicon Valley and the rest of America to retain its competitiveness.

Unfortunately, there’s a major drag on the U.S. initiative’s progress in the form of political battles. While in Canada everyone generally agreed the startup visa was simply about improving entrepreneurship, in the US the initiative became a political issue. And we all know, things don’t usually don’t move forward so long as they’re mired in politics.

Many Americans have made the startup visa a priority, like Canadians did — just not enough of the ones who have the power to make it a reality. With the legislation already out there, foreign entrepreneurs are now stuck in limbo as it sits in the House and the Senate. At this point, they still don’t know whether politics will push it past the finish line or kill it.

In the meantime, they can always apply for a Canadian visa.

Boris Wertz is one of the top tech early-stage investors in North America and the founding partner of Version One Ventures. His portfolio encompasses over 40 early-stage consumer internet and mobile companies, including GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce), Indiegogo, Top Hat Monocle, Indochino, Summify (acquired by Twitter), Wattpad, Sparkbuy (acquired by Google), Julep, Suite101, Yapta, Chloe & Isabel, Edmodo, and Flurry. Before becoming an investor, Boris was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com, which was sold to Amazon in 2008.

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While foreign entrepreneurs face a protracted immigration battle in the U.S., Canada has forged ahead with a new ‘Startup Visa‘ program.

Canada is not the first country to implement policy to entice foreign entrepreneurs; Australia and Chile have launched similar programs. But if accepted, those who choose to settle in a city like Montreal or Toronto will earn residency immediately, not in a few years.

This also isn’t the first time that the famously friendly country has handpicked groups deemed beneficial to the national economy. The New York Times called its relatively open policy “an experiment in designer immigration.”

Relative to its population, Canada takes more than twice as many legal immigrants as the United States.

“While we sit on our hands, our competitors around the globe are rolling out the red carpet to recruit the most talented individuals away from us,” observed Jeremy Robbins, special counsel in the office of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Foreign entrepreneurs are in demand, particularly those with engineering skills. Canadian policymakers hopes its new program will support new ventures, stimulate jobs creation, and bolster the region’s claim as a technology hub.

The visa is a pilot program, with an initial annual allotment of 2,750 visas available to entrepreneurs and their families.

Investors as well immigration authorities will vet potential immigrants for the startup visa. Eligible candidates will need to have procured a minimum of $25,000 in angel funding from an approved Canadian investor or $75,000 in venture funding. Entrepreneurs won’t be deported if their business fails.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., foreign entrepreneurs are pushing for a similar startup visa program. They say the current visa system makes it extremely difficult for them to stay here.

One such entrepreneur is Australian-born Josh Rio, who came to the U.S. on a B2 tourist visa, and is now on a B1 business visa. He’s currently working to apply for an L1, an inter-company transfer visa, which requires him to submit over 150 pages of evidence that his company is legitimate.

“Many of the things we do in startups haven’t yet garnered the respect of governments,” he said. “How dare you not have large overhead, HR departments, huge payrolls, and 4-6 weeks of paid holidays?” If Rio is granted his visa, he will need to reapply next year, and the U.S. may deny it even if his company is doing well.

Rio’s story is far from unique; often, foreign-born entrepreneurs are reluctant to tell their story to the press, and this is reinforced by legal advice to stay quiet.

“I didn’t come here for a lifestyle [as] I can have that in Australia. I came here to take advantage of the opportunities this country has, and I am willing to work my ass off for it,” said Rio, who is the founder of a social network called Sceene, and is a former professional skateboarder.

Not every entrepreneur has Rio’s conviction to remain in Silicon Valley — many are already considering the alternatives.

“The U.S. will lose the war for global talent if it does not follow suit and reform the U.S. immigration system to include a visa program for startups and foreign entrepreneurs,” said Susan J. Cohen, resident immigration expert at legal firm Mintz Levin. Cohen is “cautiously optimistic” about immigration reform in the U.S., and she has followed it extremely closely since being involved with implementing the U.S. Immigration Act of 1990.

The federal government began accepting petitions for H-1B visas, and is expected to surpass its annual limit by the end of this week. Only 65,000 visas are available for highly-skilled workers in industries like science, technology and engineering. The Senate is currently closer to an immigration plan that includes a new visa program for low-wage workers, but this would not affect startups.

With such slow-moving reform, should the Bay area’s tech community fear that its brightest minds will be wooed to Canada’s high-tech cluster of innovation, “Silicon Valley North?”

Most of the foreign entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley I spoke with say it’ll be a fallback option. They agree that the Bay Area is still unrivaled when it comes to access to venture capital and support for startups.

LawGives founders Tony Lai and Pieter Gunst

“I can imagine a scenario where a combination of visa issues, a declining runway, and the fortune of having a Canadian investor leads us to this path, but the complexity of moving the entire business over would likely be prohibitive,” said Pieter Gunst, the Belgian cofounder of legal technology startup LawGives.org, which helps lawyers connect with paid and pro bono opportunities. Cofounder Tony Lai is British, and is also battling with visa issues.

Over in Canada, entrepreneurs and investors are excited by the opportunity to highlight the innovation that already exists in the region. Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal, and Vancouver all have strong tech ecosystems and offer advantages, such as a less competitive talent market, local developer talent, tax credits, and universal health care.

“The government is betting that these founders will go to Canada, start a business, hire a whole bunch of people and stay for the long haul,” said Atlee Clark, the executive director of C100, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Canadian technology entrepreneurship and investment. “Jobs will be a key marker for the government in determining success,” she explained.

For Aron Solomon, an entrepreneur who runs the education innovation arm for Toronto-based MaRs, opportunities abound for more collaboration between the two regions. He suggests that entrepreneurs might relocate to Toronto and other cities, but this won’t prevent them from investment and partnership opportunities in the Bay Area.

To connect the two regions, Canada’s immigration head Jason Kenney will travel to Silicon Valley in May to meet with some of the foreign entrepreneurs who are running out of runway — and more importantly, time.

The group, led by Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), wants to make it possible for foreign entrepreneurs who will employ at least five full-time workers — who are not family members — to stay in the U.S. for up to three years. Applications would be open to holders of the H-1B or F-1 visas as long as they’ve already raised at least $100,000 in funding and are employing at least two people currently.

“Entrepreneurs who have an idea, who are wiling to invest money here, ought to be welcome here,” Moran told Hillicon Valley.

In addition, the bill would create a new five-year visa for foreign students in STEM disciplines who get a job in a technical field. Students would then have the right to become a legal resident and possibly a citizen after that five years.

Apparently, the senators are tired of educating the world and then exporting all that talent back out.

The first Startup Visa was birthed in 2010 by Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) but died stillborn. Another version in 2011 is still not resolved, and probably never will be, which makes it worth wondering if the same fate will befall the third triplet in this trio of surprisingly entrepreneurial legislation.

Existing visas such as the H1-B, which are designed for technical employees, don’t really fit the bill if you’re a founder, as Anda Gansca, CEO of Knotch, recently discovered:

“This solution just made me uncomfortable — I was starting a company, and all of a sudden I had to become someone else’s employee just to run it?”

Will the bill pass, or even get to a vote?

Vivek Wadhwa, the VP of innovation and research at Singularity University and author of a book titled The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent, is skeptical that government will solve immigration. He said in December that “if we get any immigration reform at all, it will be unpalatable to both sides. It will take months or years to negotiate and will be messy. And while the political battles rage, tens of thousands engineers, scientists, and researchers will return home and Silicon Valley will suffer.”

Hopefully the fact that this is a bipartisan bill will help it move forward.

photo credit: laverrue via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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I read the announcement today that Canada has just launched a startup visa program. By doing so, they are saying to the world, “Welcome, immigrant entrepreneurs — please come start your business in Canada.”

It’s brilliant, well executed, and modeled after the startup visa movement that a number of us have been trying to get started in the U.S. since 2009.

I continue to be really discouraged by the U.S. government activity around the startup visa movement, and more specifically around immigration reform as it applies to entrepreneurs. After trying for the past three years to get something passed, nothing has happened beyond administrative changes to the existing laws.

While in some cases this has improved the interpretation of the rules, we are still totally missing the boat here in the States. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) continue to implement the rules inconsistently, resulting in regular outrageous situations including tossing entrepreneurs with existing valid visas in jail when they enter the U.S. and banning other entrepreneurs from coming into the country as a result of misinterpretation by CBP of how things should work.

I hear at least one horrifying story a week, try to help when I can, but mostly am just embarrassed and ashamed of our U.S. policies around this.

While Canada is plowing forward, making it easy for immigrant entrepreneurs to move to Canada and start companies, the U.S. efforts are now entirely focused on “comprehensive immigration reform.” The first bills for this are supposed to start appearing in a few months, and I expect we’ll see similar dynamics that we saw around Obamacare: Endless political machinations, an ever expanding set of bills that cover all kinds of things in addition to immigration reform, and a complex set of tradeoffs with unintended consequences that no one can understand.

On top of this, I’ve heard from a number of political insider friends that “the vote math doesn’t work.” I’ve learned this means it is an incredible uphill battle to get anything passed, and the compromise that is going to happen to get certain people in Congress to support the bills means that the “tradeoffs and compromises” (which the more cynical among us — including me — means “the political bribes they need to agree to vote a certain way”) are going to be extensive.

In the mean time, Canada is shouting from the rooftops about the benefits of the startup visa program.

• The startup visa program will enable immigrant entrepreneurs to launch innovative companies that will create jobs in Canada, and eventually, compete globally.
• The program will provide entrepreneurs with valuable assistance in navigating the Canadian business environment which can sometimes prove challenging for newcomers.
• The program will provide private sector firms with access to a broader range of entrepreneurs, including the best and the brightest minds from around the world.

Since I believe entrepreneurs should be able to start their companies anywhere in the world they’d like, I applaud the Canadian government for taking action here. And I encourage any immigrant entrepreneur considering moving to the U.S. to also consider moving to Canada given this new program.

To our friends in Washington, DC: Pay attention. We continue to be less competitive because of our intransigence around immigration, especially with regard to being entrepreneurs. Canada is showing real leadership. Why not just emulate them?

Brad Feld is a managing director at Foundry Group; this post originally appeared on his blog. Feld lives in Boulder, Colo. and invests in software and Internet companies around the United States. In his spare time, he runs marathons and reads a lot.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf

(Can’t see the video? Click here.)

Don’t even get me started about the sorry state of American technological and economic competitiveness and our complete ignorance of what really made the U.S. a great and growing country since its inception.

We are so caught up with balancing what is politically correct, what is politically achievable and not disrupting paths to reelection that we have forgotten what it’s like to have dreams and to work towards a significantly better or, at least different, future.

Because we, as a nation, are so stuck dealing with the present, we have found ourselves mired in a tar pit of legislative nonsense that is slowly killing our chances to be competitive with the rapidly expanding world around us. And yes, being economically competitive is, in fact, necessary if we want to maintain our current societal dreams and values.

Because of the work of a variety of smart and dedicated people, including Paul Graham and my good friend, Brad Feld, one small, but critical cog in the complex machine of government regulation has been given a chance to turn. Late last month, Senators John Kerry (D) and Richard Luger (R), the two ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed legislation to create a Startup Visa.

Simply put, anyone from anywhere who starts a company in the U.S. and is able to reasonably capitalize it can get a visa to stay in this country to develop their business here, on American soil with American employees, paying American taxes.

That’s a no-brainer you say? You might be surprised to learn that the country is routinely kicking entrepreneurs out, telling them to start their businesses elsewhere.

These aren’t people who are taking away American jobs. They’re entrepreneurs – people who are creating new technologies, services, products and . . . wait for it . . . jobs. It’s a meritocracy, folks, the best stuff wins. Anyone is allowed to play. That is, for now, if you live here.

The new legislation is supported with over 100 signatures from leading venture capitalists and angel investors throughout the country.  I’m honored that my name is included on the list. Not because I’m an investor looking for more deals, but I’m an American with an insanely strong desire to see this country continue to set the pace for the rest of the world when it comes to opportunity and leadership.

Relatively speaking, the streets of the US are, in fact, paved with gold. I’d like to see us keep it that way and to provide opportunities for even more Americans to be able to mine it.

The text of the proposed act is embedded below, if you’d like to give it a thorough read.

Startup Visa Act Final Final 1 http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf

Image by murphydean via Flickr.