Take Google. Russian-born Sergey Brin, together with U.S.-born Larry Page, built a search engine business that today employs 31,300 people. French-born eBay founder Pierre Omidyar cultivated 17,700 jobs, and Taiwanese-born Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, paved the way for today's 13,700 Yahoo employees.  Current U.S. visa policy, however, is thwarting would-be job generators from pursuing their aims within our borders. We cannot afford to expel these vital individuals.  Consider the case of Amit Aharoni, a Stanford Business School graduate. Despite having raised $1.65 million in venture capital and created nine jobs at his San Francisco startup CruiseWise.com, Aharoni, an Israeli national, received a letter from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denying his request for a visa. Not only that, the letter informed Aharoni that he had to leave the country immediately.  Relocating to Canada in October, Aharoni continued to conduct business meetings using Skype. Only after ABC "World News" made public his predicament did the U.S. agency reconsider and approve his visa petition.  This is good news for Aharoni and CruiseWise.com, but we must wonder: Whom else are we sending away?  "We want your talent" should be our slogan. Come and build your businesses in the United States. Don't move to Bangalore or Shanghai or Dubai or Moscow. Don't go to Istanbul or Shenzhen or Sao Paulo when we need you in the emerging markets of our own country in places like Detroit, Buffalo and Cleveland. The point is that immigrant entrepreneurs create jobs, and our top priority should be to foster innovation ecosystems at home.
If we want to create jobs in America, we must welcome foreign-born innovators. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of immigrant entrepreneurs yearning to breathe free": This is the