TJ Walker argues U.S. immigration policy is pushing early-career innovators to Canada, which is fast-tracking H-1B holders and investing $1.2 billion in research. The U.S. favors wealthy investors through its gold card program while losing talent like Sergey Brin and Elon Musk once had access to. Walker warns this shift will damage American innovation long-term.
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Canada's courts Canada is in the news. Canada courts U.S. talent as America raises the price of entry. Canada is launching a major bid for global research, fast tracking immigration for H1B visa holders and investing $1.2 billion to lure top scientists from American University. Reporting from the New York Times, quotes Industry Minister Melanie Jolly saying, quote, as other countries constrain academic freedoms. Hmm, I wonder who she's talking. And undermine cutting edge research. Canada is investing and doubling down on science. Meanwhile, the US has debuted its gold card offering and yes, it does have a picture of President Trump right on it. It's offering expedited residency only to immigrants who can pay $1 million plus a $15,000 fee. The contrast is stark. Canada promises stability and opportunity. The US Is limiting entry to the already rich. As Jolly also told the Times, if you want to live in the best country on earth, come to Canada. The question is whether America is now pricing out the next generation of innovators. What's the real message here? Canada pretty smart. They see a real opportunity. They're seeing Americans push out their best and brightest, roll up the welcome mat, no longer letting in striving, really smart, aggressive, well educated young people who are at the beginning of their career. Canada's saying we want them. The United States is saying, if you're old and you've already hit a jackpot and you're ready to just sit around the pool, come to us. This is not a good thing for America's long term intellectual infrastructure. Let's dig a little deeper. Now, I am not against letting some people in who can pay a million dollar fee. I think every country should have the right to decide, you know, various criteria of who they want in. And the United States already lets more people in to its country every year than all other countries combined. At least we did until the last year or so. So United States has already historically been generous there, but obviously changing. So here's the real problem. America is successful in part. Yes, we have a great landmass. Yes, we have good ports. Yes, we're blessed to not have enemies of the north or south invading us all the time. Unfortunately, most countries around the world do. But we've also benefited extraordinarily from the fact that we attracted best and the brightest all over the world regularly. Now, let me remind you some of the people who came to the United States in the past who would not have been able to pay a million dollars because they wouldn't be eligible if they were trying to get in today. Sergey Brin, okay, he immigrated as A child from the Soviet Union. Do we really want to say, gosh, Sergey, you don't have a million dollars. Go create Google for Putin. Would that have been a good thing? I don't think so. Elon Musk. Now, I have a beef or two with Elon Musk, as I'm sure some of you do as well. But he wasn't fabulously wealthy when he came here as a student many decades ago. Andrew Carnegie, he came penniless from Scotland. So you don't want U.S. steel. Okay? Jerry Gang. Came from Yahoo, arrived from Taiwan, not even speaking English. So again, here's the problem with saying you got to pay a million dollars to get in. You're getting people who've already won the lottery. What incentive do they have to work hard? You know, Elon Musk came here. He was really hungry. Sergey Brin came here, he was hungry. Else. Andy Grove, founder of Intel, I'm sure you've heard of him. Fled Hungary with limited resource. Ariana Huff struck it big with the Huffington Post. She didn't come here rich when she came to the United States. The founder of ebay. Child of immigrants, not a millionaire when he came in. Patrick and John Collison, Founder, Stripe. They were students, not wealthy investors. We want, sure, we want rich people to come here and spend money. Spend money on restaurants and services. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that. But when it's crowding out hungry, ambitious, smart people, making it difficult for them, that's a real problem. Now you can say, well, tj, these people can just get sponsored. Google can sponsor them. Amazon can spot. Yeah, they could. The problem is, many of the most ambitious young people in the world don't want to go work for some big company that's already figured out. They have their own dream, their own plans, their own vision, and they're willing to eat the ramen noodles to make it happen. Those people are now going to do it in Canada. I hate to tell you, I've seen this firsthand. Some of you've heard me mention I. I had a student of mine, a free intern, then a paid intern, then an employee of mine from Afghanistan, someone I've now had a relationship with for a decade as a mentor and as someone who's had a working relationship. I sponsored him to come to the United States. He did gain entry to the United States. He left. Not because he was thrown into prison the way they did in Pakistan. To him, he left because Canada welcomed him with open arms. He's smart, he's ambitious, he's hardworking. He creates online Courses, software programs, and he left for Canada. So this is a huge, huge problem. America is a rich country. Depending on the metrics, it's no longer really has the largest economy if you really look at gross national product, because China has so many more people, but by many metrics the United States is still the wealthy country in the world. Well, why is that? Yes, we have the biggest tech companies in the world. All the big tech companies are all, they're based here, they're not coming out of France or Germany. Sorry. So we have big tech company, we have great universities, at least for a little while longer. We have wealth, we have the dollar. The US dollar is still a reserve currency. So all of these things are assets the United States has. But it also has intellectual power, it has human resources, capital that other countries don't because they don't let other people come in. By and large they're much, much more restricted. And now we're seeing this lost away. And it's not going to hurt us in the next six months or maybe even a year. But ask yourself, look at your 401ks right now and ask yourself, how would it look if we could go back 20 years or 25 years and no Google in it, no Microsoft in it, no, no Amazon in it? How would your 401k look? I can tell you it would be down way. We would see mediocre growth at best. You wouldn't be seeing 9, 10% a year growth in your stock portfolio for the last generation. You'd see things probably flat or maybe 1, 2, 3% if we had decided not to let aggressive, hungry and frankly poor immigrants into this country who wanted opportunity and were willing to work hard. So again, the problem is if you got an extra million dollars in cash sitting around, okay, maybe you could still be an active or a productive real estate developer or something. But in my experience, when people have a million dollars to buy a ticket in somewhere, a nightclub, a golf club, any kind of club, and let's face it, the United States is an exclusive club these days. It means you probably have about $10 million total net worth. And it's very, very rare to see someone worth $10 million who's willing to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day to create the next big thing. That problem with this Trump golden it's, it's really limiting us to people who've already made it. What makes America great, what makes our economy great so thriving, is we provide an opportunity for the most aggressive, intelligent, hard working, ambitious people in the world to make it here. And our new policies are essentially saying, no, sorry, go be aggressive. Go do your startup in another country. We'll get you on the tail end when you're spending a lot more time thinking about how to decorate your third home rather than how to create a company that could employ thousands or hundreds of thousands. Okay. Coming up in just a moment, we'll be talking about other things the United States is doing to chase people away, namely, make it really, really uncomfortable for tourists to come in America.
