Kate Mitchell urges tech entrepreneurs to tell policymakers personal stories about immigration's impact on startups. She describes an engineer from Pune who left the U.S. over green card delays, and argues individual voices matter more than corporate lobbying in shaping policy.
The policy thing I am the most passionate about, and I think a number of you in the room will agree with me, is immigration and immigration reform. I— there is nothing— and even when I sat in the Rose Garden and I had the administration and Cantor staff both asking me, because it was such a wonderful opportunity by the way, it was a great dialogue between people in Silicon Valley and Washington. And by the way, we sit here And we get so frustrated because it seems so obvious what people in Washington should do for us. In fact, so obvious that we think they should know this. They don't. They don't understand the world we live in. We are small. When I'm walking in a senator's office and big oil is walking out, I'm like an ant. Even backing up all of us, I'm small. And all of us need to speak up more. We think so much about what we do here. Speaking up matters. And when it comes to immigration, I don't need to tell you how important it is to innovation, to education. I have an employee of ours who Indian educated from Pune, engineer, business educated at Haas, worked both at Intuit and for us, challenges with his green card, is now living in Dubai and is a student and a citizen of the world is how he says it to me. It's a crime that he is not building his his companies here. He has incredible skill set and I really think we need to look at immigration reform more broadly. I come from Italian-Irish immigrants. That's part of what America has been built on, but particularly when we think about the innovation ecosystem, keeping engineers, entrepreneurs, people who are building companies. What I encourage you to do, so my call to action, a lot of you are active on social media, is to get your word out, get your story out. What you don't realize is your story is even more valuable. They've heard from Apple. They've heard Bill Gates tell the story. They've heard people like me tell the story. Your story is actually more meaningful and it may be your own personal story, it may be the person in the class sitting next to you who may not be able to continue to build their career here or are threatened and concerned about their ability to do so. That parable, that story needs to be told. I had dinner two nights ago with Senator Warner, who from Virginia, who was out here at Madera having dinner. He is one of the sponsors of something called Startup 3.0 and he said, you guys are too timid. We're not hearing you in Washington tell your stories. So I am calling on all of you who have a story to tell. It is not too small. There aren't enough other people telling it. And Tom said, you know, it's amazing. We had a ragtag group of people, you know, 17 of us who put together the IPO task force for the JOBS Act. Who knew that we would be successful in passing a law? You guys, your story around immigration will really resonate, so do tell it.
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