By admin
Abstract debates about immigration policy tend to treat restriction as a relatively low-cost choice — fewer people enter, outcomes remain roughly the same. The January 22, 2026 Immigration Policy and the Economics of Innovation conference at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, organized by J-P Conte through the initiative he funds there, offered a systematic challenge to that assumption. Across academic papers, practitioner testimony, and panel discussion, a consistent theme emerged: uncertainty in the immigration system is not a neutral condition. It has a price.
J-P Conte, managing partner and Hoover overseer, built the conference with a specific purpose: to put rigorous evidence in front of the people who most need to understand it. “The beauty of America is immigration and innovation,” he told attendees. “And immigration is key to that innovation.” The conference was designed to measure what it costs when that access is made harder to secure.
The Nova Credit Account
Misha Esipov, co-founder of Nova Credit, described what happened when his UK national co-founder needed to finalize an O-1 visa at the US embassy in London. The visa had been approved on paper. At the consular interview, immigration officials denied it anyway. For five months, Esipov’s co-founder could not return to the United States, and Nova — a company that today functions as a credit bureau helping immigrants establish creditworthiness in the US — had to build its foundation with a key team member operating from the outside.
Esipov used the episode to argue for speed and certainty as the operative standard by which to evaluate the immigration system’s fitness for startup purposes. Five months is a long time in the life of an early-stage company. Decisions that require the full founding team get delayed. Hiring conversations stall. Momentum — the thing that determines whether a startup survives its first year — erodes.
The $100,000 Fee and What It Signals
Conference attendees also discussed a more recent development: a $100,000 application fee now attached to new H-1B filings under measures enacted by the current administration. For large established companies, $100,000 per visa application is an administrative cost. For a startup with 10 employees and 18 months of runway, it can determine whether a critical hire is made at all.
A tech industry recruiter in the audience described the cumulative effect these changes are having: highly educated workers of Indian origin — the majority holding advanced degrees — are leaving the US in increasing numbers. The combination of layoff vulnerability windows, new fee structures, and general unpredictability in the visa system has shifted the calculus. For J-P Conte, these are exactly the costs that the initiative’s research agenda exists to quantify and surface — so that policymakers are working with evidence rather than intuition when they decide how tightly to constrain the pathways that skilled workers use.
