When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you over-protectionist immigration regulations, make overprotectionistimmigrationregulationade. Yeah, that line doesn’t really work.
Wired’s Olivia Solon brough my attention to Blueseed. It’s a project to station a ship 12 nautical miles off the coast of San Francisco, in international waters, so that potential tech entrepreneurs can start companies near Silicon Valley without the need for a US work visa – an incredibly tricky thing to get.
The start-up has just secured $300,000 of venture capital, writes Jason Dorrier of SingularityHub:
Now, to be fair, $300,000 in Silicon Valley is lemonade stand money. The initial venture round for Blueseed is $700,000—and that’s just for the preliminaries. Researching immigration and visa laws and choosing the best ship design, for example. To execute their plan in full, Blueseed is aiming to raise between $10 and $30 million.
At the very least, the initial investment proves that since its launch, Blueseed’s audacity has accumulated some powerful fans. And well it should. It’s a powerful idea. For those who missed the first round of hype—it’s worth revisiting. Blueseed’s mission is to tear down the archaic barriers keeping good ideas and funding apart.
The company’s plan is a more realistic version of the libertarian dream of “seasteading” – starting a new micronation, free of laws or regulations, in international waters to prove that the libertarian life is possible.
Blueseed is not directly proposing such a libertarian idea — the ship will be more like a floating hotel/office than a nation — but in offering a way to make the most of easy access to the US without having to actually obey its regulations, it is striking at the heart of what many libertarians hope to achieve.
While there may be doubt about whether Blueseed can actually work — it’s an audacious plan, which could fall prey to US immigration law, the US navy, or even pirates — there is little doubt that the fact that it is even being considered is a vindication of the arguments that US immigration policy is ridiculous.
People are considering building a ship, charging for accommodation, floating it in international waters and then offering ferries to the mainland all to provide some access to the support networks to entrepreneurs that Silicon Valley offers. If the US offered them visas, it would get all that hard work — and tax revenue too. If the west could just have a sane attitude to immigration, ideas like this wouldn’t hold water.
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