Why hiring employees with H-1B visa may help US companies

US technology startups that employ immigrant workers on H-1B visas have a higher chance of raising funds from venture capital firms and exiting through a public offer, a US-based think tank has said. These firms file more patents, generating significant economic value, according to a working paper by researchers for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
“If we compare firms that apply for H-1B visas and win in the lottery with firms that also applied but did not win, the lottery winners are more likely to receive additional external funding (and) more likely to have an IPO or a positive exit (positive exit is an IPO or being acquired for a substantial amount), and receive more patents,” Stephen G Dimmock, one of those who worked on the research paper, told ET in an email.
Dimmock, who is professor of finance in the Division of Finance and Banking at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, along with Scott J Weisbenner and Jiekun Huang of the Department of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found that companies that employed workers on H-1B visas had a 10% higher chance of raising funds, and a 25% chance over a five-year period to get a higher exit.