当唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump)当选美国总统时，Deniz Ergürel感到紧张。
When Donald Trump was elected US president, Deniz Ergürel was nervous.
“我来自土耳其——一个穆斯林占多数的国家，因此，我不知道新政府将如何对待我们，”Ergürel说，他2016年在美国创办了虚拟现实媒体初创公司Haptical。过去6个月，他一直在琢磨能否将旅游签证（仅允许他在硅谷进行商务会谈）变成一种更永久的居留形式，让他能够筹集资金，推动公司成长。
“I’m from Turkey — it’s a Muslim majority country and so I didn’t know how the new administration would treat us,” says Mr Ergürel, who founded US-based virtual reality media start-up Haptical in 2016. He spent the past six months wondering if he will be able to transition from the tourist visa that allows him to do little more than hold business meetings in Silicon Valley to a more permanent situation that would allow him to raise money and Haptical to grow.
以反移民、“美国优先”为竞选纲领的特朗普总统就任5个月后，这是许多移民创业家、以及资助他们的天使投资人都在问的问题。美国的移民程序向来官僚而复杂，但特朗普承诺对合法和非法移民都收紧政策，这带来额外的不确定性和压力。
Five months into the presidency of Mr Trump — who ran on an anti-immigration, “America First” platform — it is a question that many immigrant entrepreneurs, along with the angel investors who fund them, are asking. US immigration processes have always been bureaucratic and complicated, but Mr Trump has promised crackdowns on legal and illegal immigration that will inject added uncertainty and stress.
Ergürel说：“这就像一场以0比3开局的足球比赛。”5月，他获得了“杰出人才”签证，使他可以留在美国发展自己的企业。“在初创公司的世界里，每个人都在致力于打造下一个大发明，你也是……但你同时不得不对付所有这些法律文件和文书……这很难搞。”
“It’s like starting a football match 3-0 behind,” says Mr Ergürel, who in May was granted an “extraordinary ability” visa that will allow him to stay in the US and develop his business. “Everyone is working to build the next big thing in the start-up world, and you’re doing the same thing?.?.?.?[but] at the same time you have to work on all the legal documents and the papers?.?.?.?That’s tough.”
来自印度的尼廷(Nitin Pachisia)也曾经历旷日持久的移民过程。那段经历促使他与别人共同创立了Unshackled Ventures——一家专注于移民创始的初创企业的风投基金。“我们发现，资本是起点，但最终（他们需要能够）快速行动——创始人的时间最重要。”
Nitin Pachisia, originally from India, has also experienced the time-consuming nature of the immigration process. That led him to co-found Unshackled Ventures, a venture fund focused on immigrant-founded start-ups: “We saw that capital is the starting point but ultimately [they need to be able] to move fast — it’s the founders’ time that matters most.”
作为一个整体，移民比土生土长的美国人更具创业精神。专注创业的美国智库考夫曼基金会(Kauffman Foundation)的数据显示，移民自己创业的比例几乎是美国出生的公民的两倍，在美国所有新创业家中占比27.5%，尽管他们仅占总人口的13%。无党派的美国政策国家基金会(National Foundation for American Policy) 2016年的一项研究显示，在美国估值达到10亿美元或以上的初创公司（即所谓独角兽）中，一半由移民创立。
As a broad group, immigrants in the US are more entrepreneurial than their native-born counterparts. They are nearly twice as likely to start their own businesses as US-born citizens and account for 27.5 per cent of all new entrepreneurs in the country, according to the Kauffman Foundation, a US-based think-tank specialising in entrepreneurship, although they comprise 13 per cent of the population. Immigrants have founded half the start-ups with billion-dollar valuations — so-called unicorns — in the US, according to a 2016 study from the non-partisan National Foundation for American Policy.
硅谷移民律师索菲?奥尔康(Sophie Alcorn)表示，虽然特朗普在移民问题上的立场与前任巴拉克?奥巴马(Barack Obama)大相径庭，但迄今大部分变化只是措辞上的。“迄今最大的改变不是法律上的，”她说。“迄今的变化是心理上的，是注入恐惧、压力和羞辱，让人感觉被排斥、不受欢迎，人们害怕种族主义，人们感受到对外国人的仇视，感觉被排斥、遭排挤。”
While Mr Trump’s stance on immigration is very different from that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, any changes have mostly been rhetorical, says Sophie Alcorn, an immigration attorney in Silicon Valley. “The biggest change has not been legal,” she says. “It’s been psychological, it’s been the injection of fear and stress, shame, the feeling of being ostracised, being unwelcome, people fearing racism, people feeling xenophobia, people feeling outcast and rejected.”
尚不清楚特朗普政府是否会落实一种新的移民身份地位——这是由奥巴马政府在卸任前创建的，旨在帮助海外企业家留在美国，原定今年7月生效。特朗普最近反倒是签署了一项可能导致H-1B签证收紧的行政命令。许多科技和外包公司都利用H-1B签证雇用外籍员工。在该计划下，美国政府每年允许8.5万名外籍员工进入美国。
It is unclear whether the Trump administration will implement a new immigration status, created by the outgoing Obama administration and aimed at helping international entrepreneurs stay in the country, which is meant to go into effect in July. Instead, Mr Trump recently signed an executive order that could lead to curbs on H-1B visas, which many tech and outsourcing companies use to hire foreign workers. The government admits 85,000 foreign workers under the programme a year.
在硅谷进行密集游说后出台的新的“国际企业家规则”(International Entrepreneur Rule)，将创建一种“parole status”（而非签证），允许外国出生的创始人留在美国发展自己的初创公司。这种身份地位以前基于人道主义或医疗原因提供，但从今年7月起，它也将面向有资格的创业家——如果新规落实的话。
The new International Entrepreneurs Rule — created after intense lobbying from Silicon Valley — would create a “parole status”, rather than a visa, which would allow foreign-born founders to stay in the US to build their start-ups. Such status had previously been offered to those working on humanitarian or medical missions, but from July it is meant to apply to qualified entrepreneurs as well — pending implementation.
居于印度的夏尔马(Apoorv Sharma)称，像他这样的创业家对广受欢迎的签证没有兴趣，而是更希望获得“国际企业家规则”所提供的身份。H-1B针对的是那些想在美国找工作的人，”他说，“对于一个致力于实现自己的创意或者筹集资金的人来说，没有一年或两年签证可以申请。如今，我在（硅谷）有一个很好的投资者和创业者网络，但即便如此，我也无法筹到资金，因为没有风投资本或投资者会投给一个不能全力以赴投入的创始人。”
Apoorv Sharma, who lives in India, says entrepreneurs like him have no interest in the sought-after visa and would prefer the International Entrepreneurs Rule’s status. “H-1B is for people who want to get a job” in the US and work at another company, he says. “There are no provisions for a one-year or two-year term for someone to work on their own idea or raise money. Right now, I have a good network of investors and founders in [Silicon Valley] but even with that I can’t raise money because no VC or investors will invest money if the founder can’t work on it full time.”
夏尔马常驻孟买。他最新创立的初创公司名为Magically，总部设在旧金山，是一个为硬件初创企业在中国深圳寻找制造商的平台。
Mr Sharma is based in Mumbai. His last start-up was called Magically, which was based in San Francisco and was a marketplace for hardware start-ups to find manufacturers in Shenzhen, China.
天使投资人、旧金山DreamFunded.com的首席执行官曼尼?费尔南德斯(Manny Fernandez)说，移民身份“过去根本不是我们要核查的事情之一”。但现在情况不确定。“当你投资科技……你投资的是人。所以，如果你不知道这些人是否有坚实的基础——也就是说‘他们会不会走人？他们在一年后还会在这里吗？’——这带来真正的挑战性。”
Manny Fernandez, an angel investor and chief executive of San Francisco-based DreamFunded.com, says immigration status was “not even a thing on our checklist in the past”. But now, he says the situation is uncertain. “When you invest in tech?.?.?.?you’re investing in the people. So if you don’t know if the people have a strong foundation — meaning, ‘Will they be gone? Will they be here in a year?’ — it makes it really challenging.”