Political Quotes

“I very much appreciate the remark of the Senator from Missouri and his cosponsorship of this legislation. Let me highlight something he pointed out, which is in the short time that those of us on the floor today have been in the Senate, about 14 months, seven countries have adopted new laws to attract entrepreneurs. We have not. Listen to this fact. A recent report from the World Bank shows that America has slipped in the rankings in terms of startup friendliness from first to thirteenth. There are provisions in here about visas for those who were foreign born. This is very much about American jobs. This is about the opportunity for someone to start a company here and hire Americans. If they happen to be someone who is foreign born but highly educated in science, technology, engineering and entrepreneurial with money and they want to invest in the U.S. economy and agree to put people to work, we are saying the doors of the United States of America are open for business for purposes of hiring U.S. citizens. It is an important component. We do not want to lose this battle. As we see, these are ads from U.S. publications in which entrepreneurs are being lured to places outside the United States to start their companies. When I visited with an entrepreneur recently, they said: We could not get the person we needed to hire to work at our company because they could not get a visa. They were foreign born. So we hired them, but we put them in our plant in Canada.…”