This week Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook announced formation of new organization fwd.us

It is co-founded by leaders of USA’s technology community to focus on immigration issues and advocate a bipartisan policy agenda to build the knowledge economy. In my previous blogs I did mention how much IT outsourcing is influenced by this topic, free movement of people back and forth is key to keeping the knowledge economy humming. The statistics of how immigrants shaped the silicon valley is there for all of us to see. It has only increased with lot smaller players now emerging with innovative and cutting edge initiatives.

Unlike other sectors, in a knowledge economy the most important resources are the talented people that we educate and bring into our country. Keeping with us those that we educate in our best of the breed universities will be a big boost to our knowledge sector. Losing those talents to the poor immigration policy is a big loss in our effort to build a knowledge enterprise of the future.

The notion that welcoming immigrants in knowledge sector will take away jobs of the people who are already here has been proved to be wrong in many ways. For every immigrant that we welcome in this knowledge economy it creates two to three American jobs. A good example this year is shutting the doors to qualified immigrants via h1B going lottery way is the worst we can do ourselves to damage our fledging social media revolution which we badly need to boost our economy to grow after a recession. The need to drive down federal deficit means adding to our economy jobs and precious money via taxes, also consider the fact that the immigrants are amongst the hardest working, paying taxes and use less of entitlement that government doles out.

It’s time to think out of the box and accept the true benefits of immigration reforms and exploit it for helping grow out knowledge sector. Why settle for mediocre returns when we can be leaders.