Fewer foreign entrepreneurs say they need the U.S. Thats a problem.

Apple is facing accusations that it copied Chinese innovations in the iPhone 7. Indeed, Chinas smartphone manufacturers released dual-camera systems and handsets without headphone jacks long before Apple did. And the stickers and animations that Apple is adding to iMessage are a direct knockoff from Chinas WeChat. This is quite a twist from the days when Apple accused the Chinese of copying its inventions. The reality is that Americas most innovative company in no longer the worlds most innovative company: entrepreneurs all over the world are producing innovations that rival what you see in Silicon Valley.

This is also evidenced in the numbers of billion-dollar technology startups, unicorns, that are sprouting up all over the world. According to CrunchBase, of the 191 unicorns world wide, 42 are in China and 8 in India. Yes, more than 105 are in the U.S., but you would hardly have found any blockbuster technology startups in Asia as recently as a decade ago. Today, Chinese Internet companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are amongst the most innovative and valuable few in the world.

The worlds entrepreneurs used to dream of coming to Silicon Valley because it was the innovation capital of the world and there were few opportunities elsewhere. This is no longer the case, as I learned during my recent trip to New Delhi. There are startup incubators sprouting up all over the country, and the quality of the startups is second only to those in Silicon Valley and Chinawhich are running head to head.

I spoke to about 50 entrepreneurs at local incubators and meetups. Unlike earlier generations, very few had interest in moving to the United States. Most said that they believed the greatest opportunities were in India. As technology designer Himanshu Khanna said, Why should I move to Silicon Valley when I have a market 10 times as large here?. Khanna had asked me to sponsor him for a long-term U.S. visa five years earlier, which he could not get.

The tide has surely turned. For decades, the United States invited the worlds best and brightest to come and study at its universities and provided them with temporary work visas. But it placed tight limits on the numbers of permanent-resident visas for those who wanted to stay, so the lines grew longer and longer. My research team at Duke, Harvard, and NYU documented that there were, as of October 2006, more than a million skilled workers in immigration limbo in the U.S., with only 120,000 green cards being made available every year for their work categories.My estimate is that the backlog has now increased to more than 1.5 million. I explained the consequences of this in my book, The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent: that it would lead to a reverse brain drain. And this is exactly what happened.

Hundreds of thousands of highly skilled workers as well as the graduates of top American universities have returned home because of Americas flawed immigration policies. They are in leadership roles at top research labs and at the unicorns in China and India. America has lost an entire generation of entrepreneurs and innovators and bolstered its global competition. That is also why the proportion of immigrant founded startups in Silicon Valley fell from 52% in 2005 to 44% in 2012 and is probably even lower now.

It is in this context that the Obama administration announced its last-ditch effort to reverse the tide. On August 26, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed a rule to allow foreign entrepreneurs to enter the United States and work at qualifying startups. This uses the parole authority under which the President, through DHS, can permit certain individuals to temporarily enter the United States.

But, the Presidents immigration authority being very limited, this is a very short-term and very constrained fix. The start-up entity must have been formed within the three years before an application for entrepreneurial parole; the entrepreneurs must own at least 15 percent of the entity; only three foreigners can be employed by the startup; and the applicant must prove that the start-up has substantial potential for rapid growth and job creation by receiving investments of capital totaling $345,000 or more from established U.S. investors with a history of substantial investment in successful start-up entities or at least $100,000 in grants or awards from local, state, or federal government entities.

This is not a slam dunk for entrepreneurs wanting to come to the U.S.and it provides no clear path to permanent residency. Also, to become effective, the rule must undergo a 45-day notice and comment period in the Federal Register.Nevertheless, if it takes effect, it will be better than nothing: it will probably lead to several hundred startups’ moving to the U.S. and creating tens of thousands of jobs here.

What are needed even more badly are DHS rules that let foreigners on temporary work visas change jobs rather than be subject to abuseby their American employers. Present rules prevent employees from changing jobs while they wait for their green cards, which often take one to two decadesto arrive. This disadvantagesboth the workers on temporary visas and American workers, because it allows employers toartificially depress salaries. The foreign workers cannot also start companies, so those whom we could have creating jobs here are getting frustrated and returning home.

Immigration has become a toxic subject in the United States, thanks to thexenophobia being served up inthe election campaigns. Though the use of Presidential executive privilege is no substitute for lack of governance on Capitol Hill, we do need enactment of rules to improve the dire situation, because the countrys competitiveness is at stake morenowthan ever. To quell the social disenchantment that is creating resentment of immigrants, we need economic growth and job creation; and we need to welcome those who would bring about both.

About Author

Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University; Fellow, Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; and distinguished visiting scholar, Halle Institute of Global Learning, Emory University. He is author of ”The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent”–which was named by The Economist as a Book of the Year of 2012. Wadhwa oversees the academic programs at Singularity University, which educates a select group of leaders about the exponentially growing technologies that are soon going to change our world. These advances—in fields such as robotics, A.I., computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials—are making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve the grand challenges in education, water, food, shelter, health, and security.

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