Canadian and French Policies to Attract Entrepreneurs and Researchers Impacting Silicon Valley
Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security delayed the International Entrepreneur Rule to next March, and it is currently accepting comments on plans to rescind it altogether. The agency cited logistical challenges in vetting these new visas. The International Entrepreneur Rule was designed by the Obama Administration to support Silicon Valley and the high tech industry’s need for immigrant entrepreneurs and engineers. Immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.S. account for 44% of all startups. The news has prompted a backlash from immigrant entrepreneurs like PayPal cofounder Max Levchin and leadership at the National Venture Capital Association, who argue that rolling back the rule will drive would-be job creators to other, more welcoming nations. This is already happening.
Canada’s Global Talent Stream Visa Program For Immigrant Entrepreneurs Targets U.S. Immigration Policy
To Silicon Valley observers, Canada has always seemed incapable of igniting a technology-driven economy, despite years of the government support for telecommunications, and a byzantine maze of government grant programs for research and development. Canada has remained a laggard in R&D investment compared to other OECD industrialized nations. Venture capital and government tax policy in Canada seemed to have a focus on short-term tax deductions rather than long-term gains as in California. Then there was the demise of Nortel and the decline of Blackberry. There may be a new opportunity to bootstrap Canada into the high-tech industry big league: Trump Administration immigration policies that are already impacting Silicon Valley. Not long after Justin Trudeau’s Liberals came to power in 2015, Trudeau sensed the opportunity to exploit Trump’s anti-immigration stances and the Liberal government swung into action to create the Global Talent Stream visa program specifically designed for rapid immigration for entire entrepreneurial teams. Since that time Trump has fulfilled his promises by slashing the H1-B visa program and announcing the end of the Obama Administration’s Startup Visa Program. Immigrant enrollments at U.S. universities is already down over 40%. Startup Genome, the acknowledged global leader in entrepreneurial ecosystems rankings, currently ranks Vancouver and Toronto 15th and 16th globally in its 2017 study, but those in the know acknowledge that Canada still lacks crucial technology ecosystem capabilities. Nevertheless, Canada may be on the verge of a technology tidal wave.
Source: Trump’s Policies Are Already Sending Jobs to Canada | WIRED
Source: Macron Inspires Entrepreneurs to come to France – Financial Times
Source: Trump Administration to end Startup Visa Program – Government Tech
Macron Determined To Make France “A Startup Nation” With Major Technology Initiatives
In 2015, long before Emmanuel Macron’s launched his campaign for the Presidency of France, as a minister in the Hollande government, Macron launched a significant new technology initiative, The Camp, on a seventeen-hectare campus just outside Aix-en-Provence, designed to inspire new thinking on crucial technology issues, and to incubate new entrepreneurial companies. The Camp will open officially this Autumn. Now that Macron has swept the country in a stunning Presidential victory, it is clear that technology and entrepreneurship are crucial elements of his vision for France, backing it up with a 10B € technology-based economic development fund. The South of France generally, the Cote d’Azur and Provence are emerging as France’s technology center. France’s nuclear research facility, Cadarache, just northeast of Aix-en-Provence, is the equivalent of California’s Lawrence Livermore Labs, and the home of ITER, the European nuclear fusion project. Prior to Macron’s 2015 launch of The Camp, the government had already established the Sophia Antipolis technology park near Nice, as a center for advanced telecommunications research and entrepreneurial start-ups.
The Camp, Aix-en-Provence
As if to underscore France’s rise on the global stage, France has recently leapfrogged the U.S. and Great Britain as the world’s new leader in “soft power,” the ability to harness international alliances and shape the preferences of others through a country’s appeal and attraction.
The Guardian
Source: Boris Johnson is a clown who has united the EU against Britain | Jean Quatremer | Opinion | The Guardian
Friday 25 November 2016 13.36 GMTLast modified on Friday 25 November 2016 14.36 GMT
Britain can be proud of itself. Once again, it had already shown the world the way. In propelling Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to triumph on 23 June, it demonstrated well before 8 November that Donald Trump was nothing new.
In fact foolishness, vulgarity, inconsistency, and irresponsibility seem actually to be British inventions that have been painstakingly copied – once more – by the Americans.
The age of such drab characters as Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron is over. No more, it appears, must we suffer leaders equipped with a brain and a sense of the common interest. The hour of the political clown has come.
In a few short weeks, Boris Johnson, the former journalist – for whom facts were never an obstacle likely to get in the way of a good story – has succeeded in squandering what little sympathy and understanding was left in Europe for a Great Britain embroiled in the mess of this referendum.
It is quite some diplomatic achievement to have succeeded in uniting, as never before, the 27 remaining members of the European Union – including Germany and the Netherlands – who are all now firmly together in deciding to do the UK no favours whatsoever.
It will be a “hard Brexit” not because that is what Theresa May wants, but because her future ex-partners consider they have no choice faced with a Great Britain so resolutely indecisive.
Johnson has deeply annoyed his continental partners by displaying, firstly, his complete ignorance of the union (perhaps not altogether surprising if you knew him as a “journalist” in Brussels, as I did). According to his very personal interpretation of the European treaties, it is “bollocks” to say that the four fundamental freedoms (free movement of people, goods, services and capital) are inseparable.
“Everybody now has it in their head that every human being has some fundamental God-given right to move wherever they want,” he said earlier this month.
For Johnson, here there can of course be a “dynamic trade relationship and we will take back control of our borders, but we remain an open and welcoming society”.
Yet the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, warned him very clearly as early as September. “We’ll happily send Her Majesty’s foreign minister a copy of the Lisbon treaty,” he said. “He can then read about the fact that there’s a certain connection between the single market and the four freedoms. At a pinch, I can talk about it in English.”
Schäuble reiterated on 18 November that there “will be no à la carte menu. There is only the whole menu or none.” His Dutch colleague Jeroen Dijsselbloem, meanwhile, hammered the message home: Johnson is spouting stuff that is “intellectually impossible” and “politically unachievable”.
Nevertheless, Johnson repeats his mantra ad infinitum: he is right, and the others are all wrong. The problem, however, is that at the end of the day it is the others who will decide. And if you want something from someone, it is generally wiser to avoid telling them they are an idiot.
But the foreign secretary adds clumsiness to ignorance. Johnson – who has, remember, written a biography of Winston Churchill – does not seem to grasp that it takes a mind with a rare degree of finesse to be able to combine humour and diplomacy.
His quip that the Italians would sell less prosecco to Britain if the UK was not able to stay in the single market not only created a diplomatic incident, but underlined the obvious weakness of the British argument: if the EU risks losing access to a market of 64 million Brits, Britain will lose access to a market of 440 million Europeans.
And last but not least, Johnson, who himself raised the spectre of hordes of Turkish citizens arriving in the UK if it stayed in the union, now steps up as as the most ardent defender there is of Ankara joining the EU – even if it reintroduces the death penalty.
“I can no longer respect this,” raged the normally placid Manfred Weber, leader of the conservative EPP group in the European parliament. “When you want to leave a club, you have no say anymore in the long-term future of this club.”
A famous French screenwriter Michel Audiard coined a phrase in the early 1960s that applies perfectly to Johnson: “Les cons, ça ose tout, c’est même à ça qu’on les reconnaît.” This means, roughly: “Fools” (to choose a relatively inoffensive rendering) “will try anything – that’s how you know they’re fools.”
The foreign secretary, who like Trump is no fan of beating about the bush, will pardon my familiarity. Or perhaps not.