I think this is a good idea for investor and tech entrepreneurs (building a business in US opens a ton of capital opportunities), but I think it's fundamentally

I think this is a good idea for investor and tech entrepreneurs (building a business in US opens a ton of capital opportunities), but I think it's fundamentally at odds with immigration and popular opinion, and thus the effect on policy, in the United States. Here's the argument: The US is tough on immigration because supposedly immigrants will take American jobs. American people - which we'll broadly define as the "middle class" who statistically speaking don't have these tech skills - don't want this. Why would they want foreigners taking their jobs? It makes no sense. Thus they will vote, or have political influence, tending to enact policy that is tough on immigration. Founder visas for tech companies with the intention of creating jobs does not change this, because it creates tech jobs. Middle class America can't fulfill this in meaningful-enough numbers for there to be any positive political influence. "Let us show you what we can do with 100 visas. This will be measurable, and in 5 years, we can tell you exactly how many jobs get created." This won't matter much until jobs get created in large enough numbers for the middle class. What's important though will be (and it's hard to tell if this is the case) a "trickle-down" effect, where these relatively small number of tech jobs created lead to the creation of other jobs that have a meaningful impact. EDIT - an example that comes to mind is Homejoy, which creates more maid jobs... but boy oh boy can this sort of thing sound like inequality ("let foreign founders come in to make web services turning Americans into maids!"). Think about it - even if a new Google pops up in the next 5 years - that's 25K jobs. Drop in the ocean. 2.2M jobs were created in 2012; let's say in 5 years 10M jobs are created. 25K new tech jobs for a new Google represents a difference of 0.25%. I guess that's something - but how many of those 25K jobs will be filled by American citizens? In short - there's absolutely no reason not to have a founder visa like proposed. That would be sweet. But from the policy makers' perspectives, it doesn't look like there's a compelling enough reason to change the status quo. If anything it's just easy to paint as "let rich investors bring in foreign engineers to build new websites and apps". Doesn't really resonate. Feel free to point out flaws in this argument, it would probably help the OP's cause. I made my post purposely cynical, because these are the sort of opinions and spins that will need to be addressed.