Futurist Thomas Frey: Between 1990 and 2005, immigrants created 25% of all the publicly traded companies in the U.S. These included some of our best-known businesses such as Intel, Sun, eBay, Yahoo, and Google. This same group of foreign nationals went on to become the inventors behind 25% of all patents filed in U.S. in 2006.
Ever since the World Trade Center bombing, the U.S. has been tightening the screws on immigration policy. So much so that securing work visas for the thousands of foreign-born engineers and thinkers that U.S. companies desperately need for them to conduct business has become a serious impediment. Many fledgling companies simply can’t afford the effort.
Problems like this are screaming for a solution and a new startup called Blueseed, founded by Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija, may have a solution.
Blueseed, now funded by
PayPal founder Peter Thiel, proposes to create visa-free floating work villages in international waters, with the first to be located within helicopter distance of Silicon Valley.
So will this ingenious plan to circumvent U.S. immigration policy lead to more policy tampering and eventually an erosion of the power of nations? Here are a few possible scenarios that are sure to surprise you.
