By Yegor Denisov-Blanch

About the author: Yegor Denisov-Blanch is an artificial intelligence researcher attending Stanford University.

I'm an artificial intelligence researcher in Silicon Valley studying how to measure and radically improve software development. Recently Elon Musk and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen both shared my research showing that about 10% of the over 50,000 software engineers in companies around the world who participated in the study do almost no work. A prominent technologist predicted my findings would become one of the "most heavily cited research results in the software industry."

But it is tough to enjoy such accolades while consumed with fear that I will be kicked out of the U.S. It has already happened once, in 2018, after my visa expired during the first Trump administration. I can't stop wondering, will this country's creeping anti-immigration sentiment force me out again?

My journey to America began at 14. I was living with my family in my native Spain when my mother developed Stage 4B cancer. I dropped out of eighth grade, taught myself coding, and started a business to help pay for her care. She died before I could get a high school degree.

The U.S. came through. I was offered a chance to skip five years of school. I entered Indiana University on a student visa as a middle school dropout; I graduated summa cum laude and an Olympic weightlifting national champion. The American dream came true.

I got a job at global logistics giant DHL in Miami, thanks to my command of four languages. But my promising career hit a wall when my student visa expired. My future hinged on pure chance. To stay, I needed to win an H-1B work visa lottery in which 80% of applicants aren't chosen. I lost. DHL relocated me to Germany, where I spent four years helping to orchestrate the distribution of two billion Covid vaccines.

While I was in Germany, I was also orchestrating my return to the U.S. In 2022, I secured another student visa. I picked Stanford over offers from Harvard, MIT, and Columbia, injecting myself into the epicenter of the global AI boom. My research is helping large tech companies determine and improve the performance of their software engineering teams. Venture capitalists have offered me millions of dollars in funding, and we are attracting major companies as partners.

But I've never shaken the trauma of getting kicked out. I watched as anti-immigrant rhetoric became policy, limiting not just illegal but legal immigration. The first Trump administration rolled out 52 policies to limit access to visas and green cards for highly skilled workers, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, a pro-immigration think tank. Now I worry the new administration will make it even harder for me and others to help this country.

That is my point. I and many like me try to make contributions to this country, follow the rules, and yet it feels impossible to find security in our lives here. Is this really how Americans want immigration to work?

Why eliminate a path for young entrepreneurs who would follow in the footsteps of fellow immigrants such as chief executives Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia? And of President Donald Trump's largest donor and one of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, Elon Musk. And of Melania Trump.

For months, anti-immigration advocates have touted Project 2025, which proposes to effectively close H-1B visas for recent graduates, restrict visa eligibility by country, and allow the government to pause visa and residency applications if backlogs become "excessive." The administration says Project 2025 isn't official policy, but many of its actions so far have followed the document's blueprint.

Imposing more restrictions on legal, high-skilled workers would pull the brakes on U.S. innovation. Consider:

   -- Almost half of tech founders who have built companies worth at least $1 
      billion (so-called unicorns) were born outside the U.S.; 
 
   -- Eighty percent of America's unicorn tech companies have an immigrant 
      founder or an immigrant in a key leadership role; 
 
   -- Foreign-born students represent 45% of U.S. Ph.D.'s in science, 
      technology, engineering, and math, the so-called STEM fields; 
 
   -- Of all Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics 
      since 2000, 40% of recipients weren't born in the U.S. 
 
   -- In critical fields such as AI and quantum computing, more than 60% of 
      graduate students at top U.S. universities are international students. 
      However, many are forced to leave after graduation due to visa 
      restrictions. 

Instead of effectively exporting expertise to China and other competitor nations, the administration should facilitate high-skilled immigration because it strengthens America's competitive advantage. There are many ideas worth considering. Here are a few.

   -- Eliminate the H-1B lottery and replace it with a merit-based system that 
      ensures top candidates have a clear path forward. 
 
   -- Consider adapting a much stricter version of the points system used in 
      Canada, which focuses on merit. 
 
   -- Staple a green card to the master's and Ph.D. degrees of people in 
      critical fields like AI and quantum computing. 
 
   -- Consider approaches used in the United Kingdom, which gives a 
      straightforward path to residency for recent graduates from a set of the 
      world's top universities. 

I'm grateful for the opportunity to study and work in the U.S. America owes me nothing, but I owe America everything. Mr. Trump, your administration kicked me out once. I mustered the stamina to claw my way back. Don't kick me out again -- for my sake and for that of Silicon Valley, the U.S. economy, American entrepreneurship, and technological innovation. Please.

Guest commentaries like this one are written by authors outside the Barron's newsroom. They reflect the perspective and opinions of the authors. Submit feedback and commentary pitches to ideas@barrons.com .

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 13, 2025 02:30 ET (07:30 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.