Yeah, but your objection makes no sense and is probably rooted (apologies, and read this in a courteous tone) in the fact that you saw Kerry's name and had a gut reaction + ipso facto (FYI, Lugar's a republican).
The legislation proposed moves us from "no way, no how" to "imperfect system" -- if you're primarily for relaxing immigration policies for professionals, you should support the bill in principle, favor it over nothing, and probably have quibbles. This bill would mean more professional immigration for the purpose of starting companies -- along with the requisite amount of BS, hassle, unfair playing field etc that apply to all visa situations as things stand now.
I canvassed Toledo for Kerry in '04. I got chased off someone's property for knocking on a door doing GOTV for ACT without noticing that the guy was flying a Confederate Flag. I donate to liberal political causes. I'm not just liberal: I'm a Democrat.
You're doing your argument a disservice by engaging with personalities (rightly or, here, wrongly) instead of ideas.
This isn't a personal criticism, because I demonstrably don't occupy the high ground on this point on HN. But you may want to be aware of it.
Well, I suppose I'm just massively misunderstanding your objection here.
It seems that we share the goal of increased immigration of professionals and enabling them to succeed in america, shared prosperity and all of that..
This bill, to me, is incremental progress towards that goal but flawed on some specifics.. do you agree?
Is your opposition a case of "not good enough and hold out for better"? The specifics about VCs controlling the visa are the deal-breaker for you? How is that so much worse than H-1B where the employer controls the visa?
Honest questions, I really don't understand the argument.
There are two specifics to this bill that I object to.
The first is giving venture capitalists this role in public policy.
The second is carving out visas for a form of entrepreneurship modeled on VC-funded tech startups.
If a business creates jobs, I don't see how it's relevant to public policy that it hits a $1MM revenue threshold or (even more weirdly) a $1MM capital investment requirement.
Well, they need to have some sort of criteria to prevent gaming the system. I think we'd both agree that you can't open the floodgates by investing $1 each in 50 paper businesses in order to get 50 visas.
