Foreign born founders navigating the US visa process will soon have an additional road to entrepreneurship in Illinois.
Five Illinois universities will launch Global Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) programs geared toward retaining foreign born founders through the H-1B visa, the city of Chicago will announce in a press conference Wednesday. These universities include Northwestern University, Loyola University, DePaul University, Columbia College Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology.
In the first year of the program, the universities would sponsor between 10 and 20 visas for founders whose companies have the potential to create 150 jobs over three years, according to a release from City Hall. Entrepreneurs will be employed by the universities depending on their stage of growth: Early stage entrepreneurs will work part-time at the university in a role suited to their expertise, while later stage startups will be "physically housed" at the university and through an affiliation with the university's entrepreneurship center or innovation hub, provide mentor services for students on campus. Each university will fund their own program, have their own application process and requirements, and programs will start this fall.
While the H-1B lottery, which awards visa to highly skilled workers, is particularly difficult to obtain (just 36 percent of applicants receive a visa through the yearly lottery for 85,000 visas), employees of universities are exempt from the cap and can receive H-1B visas more smoothly.
A similar Global EIR program was launched in Massachusetts in 2014, first at University of Massachusetts' Boston and Lowell campuses, and more recently at Babson College. Since launching, the Massachusetts GEIR has sponsored 23 local entrepreneurs whose companies have created 416 jobs and generated $185 million in private investment since 2014, according to City Hall.
Since then, University of Colorado-Boulder, and City University-New York have launched similar programs. San Jose State University, University of Missouri-St. Louis, the University of Alaska in Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University are also creating similar programs.
In the past, foreign-born founders looking to stay in Chicago have looked to Global EIR programs in other states as they ran out of other visa options: The founders of Fitness Cubed, for example, were accepted to the UMass-Boston GEIR program before receiving a visa that allowed them to stay in Illinois.
Immigrants are a driving force of entrepreneurship coming out of universities in Illinois. In 2015, "immigrants made up 17.7 percent of the workforce in Illinois, but accounted for 23.1 percent of STEM workers in the state and 22.1 percent of entrepreneurs," the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition reported in October, and two of Illinois' unicorn startups (Mu Sigma and Avant) have foreign born founders. Illinois loses out on $645 million per year by not retaining foreign-born students, a report from the Chicago Coalition for Global Affairs found.
This is reflected at the national scale as well: Immigrants make up 13 percent of the US population, but 51 percent of the unicorns in the US have foreign-born founders.
There's been talk of reforming the current H-1B system. Already this month immigration authorities announced "premium processing" of H-1B visas (in which workers can pay extra to request faster approval) won't be available after April 3.
In the meantime, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has recently been talking up Chicago across the country. He took ThinkChicago, a World Business Chicago program that seeks to attract and retain tech talent, on the road earlier this year with visits to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Stanford University, and will stop by University of Michigan, Purdue University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology later this year. Now, he's looking to take that message international.
“In today’s global economy we need to welcome talent and support the entrepreneurial spirit that has made us the greatest economic power in the world,” said Mayor Emanuel in a statement. “While Washington continues closing itself off to diversity driven ideas and innovation, in Chicago we are expanding our status as a welcoming city with this program, which both attracts and retains the highly skilled entrepreneurial talent that spurs innovation, creates jobs, and drives the economic growth of our City.”
Note: Updated to include Columbia College Chicago.
Additional reporting by Utsav Gandhi.
