Chile creates welcome mat for entrepreneurs

The Economist:

ONE by one they came to the stage and pitched their ideas to the crowd. There was the founder of Kwelia.com, which makes software that helps landlords mint more money from their properties. There was the co-founder of Chef Surfing, an online service for people looking to hire chefs, and for culinary wizards keen to tout their skills. And the creator of Kedzoh, which has an app that lets firms send short training videos to workers via their mobile phones or tablet computers. 

These and other start-ups, some sporting fashionably weird names such as Chu Shu, Wallwisher and IguanaBee, won rapturous applause from the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the audience. To your correspondent, who is based in Silicon Valley, it all felt very familiar. Yet this scene took place in Chile, a nation better known for copper-mining and cheap wine than for innovation.

Many countries have sought to create their own versions of Silicon Valley. Nearly all have failed. Yet Chile’s attempt is interesting because it exploits the original Silicon Valley’s weak spot—America’s awful immigration system. When the home of free enterprise turns away entrepreneurs, Chile welcomes them.

“Start-Up Chile” is the brainchild of Nicolas Shea, a Chilean businessman who had a brief stint in government. The programme selects promising young firms and gives their founders the equivalent of $40,000 and a year’s visa to come and work on their ideas in Chile. Since 2010, when Start-Up Chile started, some 500 companies and almost 900 entrepreneurs from a total of 37 countries have taken part. Start-Up Chile has doled out money to Chileans, too (see chart). 

Mr Shea says he was inspired by his experience in America, where he studied at Stanford University, a wellspring of high-tech start-ups. “I saw smart people being kicked out of the United States because they couldn’t get visas to stay,” he says. “And I thought: why not bring some of them to Chile?” 

Like several other countries, including Brazil and Mexico, Chile wants to establish itself as the entrepreneurial hub of Latin America. It has launched government-funded seed-capital programmes to back local start-ups and made it easier to set up a new company swiftly. Via Start-Up Chile it has also been importing foreign entrepreneurs, in the hope that they will inspire homegrown ones.
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Since Chile invited economist from the University of Chicago down to help them set up a free market economy, they have had one of the most robust economies in South America.   Their Social Security system relies on investments rather than a defined benefit model and provides superior results to that of the US.  It is the kind of program Democrats hate because it takes away their control freak model and replaces it with a market oriented model.

It is not surprising that they would be welcoming to entrepreneurs.

I take issue that the US immigration  system is awful.  Democrats do keep it from being more effective by inviting illiterate poor people who they hope to convert to future Democrat voters to immigrate illegally without consequences, while denying green cards to smart educated people who might start a business.  Democrats are the problem, not the immigration laws.