My Business That Almost Wasn't
In 2005 the green card showed up just in time. In 2026 it doesn't show up at all.
Vivek has been my business partner for 25 years. Three companies. Hundreds of jobs. A lot of taxes paid to a country he chose on purpose. All of it almost wasn't.
Early in his time in the U.S., he wasn't sure if his green card was going to arrive before his visa expired. He couldn't risk overstaying, so he and his wife filled out the paperwork to immigrate to Canada. That day, the road forked. Lucky for Vivek. Lucky for me. Lucky for U.S. GDP and the hundreds of employees who built generational wealth from the equity in the companies we built together. The green card arrived in the nick of time.
If he was a young man in the same position today, none of us would be so lucky.
More than 1.8 million people are currently waiting for employment-based green cards. Because of per-country caps, an estimated 400,000 Indians will die in line before their number comes up. That's the system as it was. Friday made it worse.
The tl;dr: USCIS announced Friday that anyone in the U.S. on a temporary visa who wants a green card now has to leave the country and apply from their home country. Hundreds of thousands of people a year. Effective immediately. There are unspecified "extraordinary circumstance" exceptions; nobody knows what they mean. Lawyers are telling clients to wait and see.
Let's ignore fairness, decency, and the promise of America.
Let's talk about money.
First, let's orient ourselves in some facts. Unpopular as that might be.
46% of the 2025 Fortune 500 was founded by immigrants or their children.
55% of America's billion-dollar startups had at least one immigrant founder.
Immigrant labor is not a flavor or a feature of American capitalism. IT IS AMERICAN CAPITALISM.
And this green card debacle is just the newest assault on it.
Remember the $100,000 slap on every new H-1B? The one that priced every mid-market company and rural hospital out of the global talent pool overnight?
REMEMBER the 5,844 NIH grants killed in February? Three out of four U.S. scientists told Nature they're packing.
REMEMBER the tariffs costing your small-business customers $90,000 every quarter?
Run a company in this environment and tell me you can recruit. Tell me you can price. Tell me you can plan past the next quarter. Tell me you can ship a product that depends on a supply chain or a research pipeline or a team that includes someone with an accent.
I'm not going to argue fairness. Or decency. Or the promise of America. I've been told that's not what these platforms are for. So I made the only case I'm allowed to make: we are setting our own house on fire with all the cash inside.
If you run a company and you've been quiet because this stuff is "political" — and you tell yourself your business isn't — go read your last earnings call. Politics is sitting on every line.
In 1946 a Frenchman named Georges Doriot arrived in Boston. No family. No money. He dropped out of Harvard Business School, became a professor there for thirty years, and in his spare time invented venture capital. His first check returned seven thousand times.
The engine of the American economy has always been the immigrant.
Vivek knocked. Doriot knocked. We opened the gate, and we are all richer for it.
Today the gate is closed.
We are about to find out what that costs us.