New visa to make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to launch start-ups in U.S.

be. “Being there at the time really launched me. I would never have spotted the social gaming opportunity had I not been there.”

The start-up visa is aimed at streamlining the U.S. EB-5 visa system which was initially introduced in 1990 to attract foreign capital to the United States. Each year 10,000 EB-5 visas are available but to get one, applicants need to invest $1 million and create ten full-time jobs.

Polis said he wants “a new class of eligibility” with the start-up visa. It would be granted to foreign entrepreneurs if their business plan attracts either $250,000 from a venture capital operating company that is primarily U.S. based or $100,000 from an angel investor. They must also show that the business will create five to ten jobs or generate a profit and at least $1 million in revenue.

Some of these requirements may well be changed when the bill goes to committee in the new year. “Immigration reform is a big discussion in Washington,” said supporter Brad Feld, who is also a managing director with venture company the Foundry Group. “We think the start-up visa is an easy thing to talk about and get consensus around in terms of having a positive spin on entrepreneurship and creating jobs.”

Some critics fear that making it easier for entrepreneurs to set up shop will hurt Americans by taking jobs away from them. “I feel incredibly strongly that that is a misinterpretation of the proposal,” said Eric Ries a venture advisor and author. “Some people have called those opposed to new immigration reform xenophobes and that is why I think it is important we craft this proposal so it addresses those concerns. This is not a new visa category but reform of an existing but flawed category,” he told BBC News.

The proposal’s backers say that far from taking away jobs, new jobs will emerge that were never there in the first place. “If the capital is available for the market, we should jump to bring those people here. Those jobs only get created once the founders get funded. This is a market driven decision,” said Dave McClure, an internet entrepreneur, investor and start-up advisor.

YouNoodle is a start-up company founded by two British entrepreneurs. It tracks the start-up sector and said the figures speak for themselves. “If just ten thousand start-up visas were made available this would mean over 3000 additional new innovative and funded companies would be based in the U.S. every year,” said Kirill Makharinsky, YouNoodle co-founder. “They would generate more than 10,000 jobs on average every year. In the first 10 years that would add up to over 500,000 highly-skilled new jobs So the upside is huge and the downside is negligible because no jobs are being taken away from US citizens,” Makharinsky told BBC News.

For McClure, the consequences of not establishing a start-up visa class are obvious. “We will lose out because we are not being competitive with the rest of the world,” he said. “There are similar programmes in Canada, the U.K., and Australia. They are all vying for the top entrepreneurs and if we only look at our own citizens, we are only taking 10-20% of the world’s talent into consideration here. That would be short-sighted in the extreme.”