Mike Krieger discusses the head-banging experience of navigating
the U.S. immigration system
Instagram almost didn’t happen, and the U.S.’s convoluted immigration system would have been to blame. Before Mike Krieger created the wildly popular photo-sharing app with business partner Kevin Systrom, he was living in Silicon Valley on a temporary work visa. If not for some lucky breaks navigating the country’s immigration process, our world of artfully filtered, boxy photographs might look very different today.
A native of Brazil, Krieger came to the U.S. to study at Stanford University on a student visa. After graduating, he got a job at Meebo, and the software startup helped him apply for an H-1B visa. This class of temporary visa is designated for specialty workers, and the technology industry is a major customer. Google, Facebook, Intel, and other tech giants mail tens of thousands of applications off to government processing centers each year in hopes of securing the limited supply of visas for foreign computer programmers and engineers.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began accepting applications on April 1, and, like in recent years, the number of requests quickly exceeded the cap. The agency said on Tuesday that it will stop accepting applications and will hold a random lottery to determine which companies’ employees will be awarded visas from the 85,000 available slots. In 2014 only about half made it through the lottery. The agency hasn’t yet disclosed the number of requests it’s received this year.
The H-1B frenzy wasn’t Krieger’s
biggest concern when he applied through Meebo in 2009. One of the few upsides
to the lousy economy then was that a visa was available—H-1Bs are easiest to
get when few employers are hiring. A few months after getting his visa, Krieger
started talking with Systrom about building a social networking app.
One of the first technical challenges they faced had nothing to
do with programming: It was transferring Krieger’s H-1B to the new
company. In an interview, Krieger says he waited for more than three
months while Systrom hired a lawyer, and he filed papers to get the work visa.
As the weeks dragged on, Krieger found himself spending hours studying the
intricacies of immigration law and checking websites such as trackitt.com, where visa applicants
share war stories. “It was approaching the point of hard
conversations,” he says. “I had moments where I was like, ‘Maybe I should
just tell Kevin to forget about it and find somebody who is easier to hire.’”
Finally the paperwork came through, and Krieger got clearance to
stay in the country to work with Systrom in April 2010. The
Instagram app for the iPhone took a few weeks to develop. “It took less time to
build Instagram than it did for me to get my work visa,” he says. The app
was an instant hit, and Facebook agreed to acquire the startup for about
$1 billion in April 2012. A couple of months later, Google
bought Meebo, Krieger’s former employer, for about a tenth
of the price.
Krieger first spoke out to promote changes to U.S. immigration
rules in 2012, when he visited the White House and was a guest of First Lady
Michelle Obama at the State of the Union address. President Obama gave Krieger
a shoutout in a speech in January 2013. Recently, the 29-year-old
multimillionaire got a green card, ensuring permanent residence. Krieger
remains one of the technical masterminds behind Facebook’s Instagram, which has
about 200 employees and more than 300 million users who check the app at least
once a month.
While tech companies want to free up more H-1B visas, others in
the U.S. are pushing for restrictions, saying foreign workers take American
jobs and lower wages. Krieger says the government should make sure
employers aren’t abusing the system and should improve how it distributes
visas. “Lotterying it out year after year, basing it on timing—as a software
engineer, it feels wrong. It’s like applying a random function to your
immigration,” he says.
Still, Krieger emphasizes that skilled immigrants are a
positive factor in the American workforce. “The U.S. economy really benefits
from letting the right people in. Some of them will go on to become job
creators; some of them will just go on to do really well at their jobs,” he
says. Instagram may not have been the best example of a “job creator.” After
Obama’s 2013 speech, the
Wire pointed out that Instagram had only 13 employees when
it was sold to Facebook.
Today, Facebook relies so much on foreign workers that it’s
one of the biggest companies on the government’s list of “H-1B-dependent
employers.” The designation refers to companies employing at least 15
percent of their U.S. workforce via H-1B visas.
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