Amy Nice—Co-Director and Head of U.S. STEM Immigration
‍Amy has worked on immigration law and policy issues for over 35 years. Most recently, she was the Biden administration’s lead on STEM immigration policy, where she led key reforms to attract and retain global STEM talent, developing four new agency actions that impact the O-1, EB-1, J-1, and National Interest Waiver (NIW). Amy served in the Office of General Counsel in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and was executive director of immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Before moving to policy work in 2010, Amy practiced immigration law at Dickstein Shapiro in DC, where she developed broad-based business immigration expertise.

‍Jason Wendle–Co-Director and Head of Global Mobility
Jason is a Managing Director at the Global Development Incubator with over 20 years of experience designing and building social ventures. His portfolio at GDI includes some of the world’s pioneers of an emerging field tackling global inequality by helping people move for opportunity. Since 2020, he has been working to define and shape this field, convinced that the migration opportunity is the most neglected area of global development funding relative to its impact. He has worked on both philanthropic and impact investment funds. For example, he designed a grant funding mechanism to deploy $75M to combat human trafficking — which itself is driven by lack of access to good mobility options.
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Diane Rish–Deputy Director, U.S. STEM Immigration
Diane is a U.S. immigration attorney with more than 14 years of experience in the field of U.S. immigration law and policy. Most recently, she served as Senior Manager of Immigration (Policy, Strategy and Analysis) at Salesforce, a cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco. Previously, she served as Associate Director of Government Relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) where she advocated on behalf of AILA and its 15,000+ immigration attorney members for immigration-related policy, regulatory and legislative reforms before Congress, the White House and federal agencies. Diane began her legal career at Ogletree Deakins where she developed expertise in business immigration, with a focus on the semiconductor and advanced technology industries.
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Alizah Merali–Deputy Director, Global Mobility
‍Alizah is a Manager at the GDI, where she works with entrepreneurs to build and scale social ventures that improve outcomes for low-income populations. Her focus is in the childcare and global mobility sectors. Formerly, she was a strategy consultant, where she advised executives across North America and Europe on crafting business transformation strategies grounded in behavioral economics. 
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The team will be supported by a team of advisors, including:

• Parth Ahya, Chief of Staff, Renaissance Philanthropy
  
• Jeff Alstott, Senior Information Scientist, RAND Corporation and Professor of Policy Analysis, Pardee RAND Graduate School
  
• Fanta Aw, PhD, Executive Director and CEO of NAFSA
• Lawrence S. Bacow, President Emeritus, Harvard University
• Amanda Baran, former Chief of the Office of Policy & Strategy at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for the Biden administration
• Michael Clemens, Professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University
• Helen Dempster, Deputy Director for Center for Global Development's Migration, Displacement, and Humanitarian Policy directorate
• Johann Harnoss, BCG Henderson Fellow for Global Migration, and the Co-Founder and CEO of Imagine Foundation
• William Kerr, Professor at Harvard Business School and the co-director of Harvard's Managing the Future of Work Project
• Lant Pritchett, Development Economist
• Leo Rafael Reif, President Emeritus, MIT
• Rajat Suri, Co-Founder, Lima, Presto, Lyft
• Julia Willemyns, Founding Co-Director, UK Day One
• Lisa Zeiger, Partner, Spero Ventures, Former-Head of Mobility, Stripe

Talent Mobility Fund aims to increase the use of  existing, legal immigration pathways to the U.S. and other OECD countries. These include but are not limited to:

• O-1 Visa: The O-1 visa is issued by the US government to foreign nationals demonstrating "extraordinary ability," which is evidenced by fulfilling at least 3 of 8 criteria, such as accolades from prestigious organizations or contributions to peer-reviewed journals. Introduced without a numerical cap or per-country limit, and offering unlimited one-year renewals, the O-1 visa aims to attract global talent. Despite the availability of approximately 1.1 million STEM PhD holders worldwide and nearly 50,000 foreign-born STEM professionals entering the US for PhDs or post-docs annually, only about 3,500 O-1 visas were approved in 2021, before the implementation of new policy guidance in 2022. With an approval rate around 90%, the low uptake among STEM experts suggests a lack of application awareness among eligible individuals. There exists significant potential to increase the O-1 visa uptake.
  
• EU Skilled Worker Visas: Most EU countries offer uncapped work visas for skilled workers, including in the trade and service sectors. Countries like Portugal, Spain, and Germany, with its Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz (FEG) reforms, are working to make it easier for workers and employers to access these visas, e.g., through commitments to recognize origin-country qualifications. However, utilization is limited due to the need for better navigation tools, language learning, and skills certification support for both employers and workers. Innovations to address these issues, and to enable private actors to overcome finance and risk barriers, can unlock scale far beyond that of current government-administered pilot programs.
  
• EU Student and Apprenticeship Pathways: High-school graduates from low- and middle-income countries could legally access student visas to fill over a million slots in low-cost or tuition-free university programs in countries like France, Belgium, and Germany. Following graduation, job search periods of 12-18 months enable long-term employment and residence opportunities. Apprenticeship pathways offer similar opportunities, and combine paid work and vocation training. For both types of pathways, access to finance is a constraint and addressing financial proof requirements could enhance the visa’s accessibility.
  
• Early Career STEM Initiative (J-1): Launched under the J-1 visa framework, the Early Career STEM Research Initiative promotes placements of researchers in host companies for up to five years, without caps or per-country limits. Despite its introduction in 2022 to expand the scope of hosting researchers beyond universities to companies, the initiative has seen limited adoption. This suggests a need for increased promotion and understanding of this new placement opportunity among potential host companies and researchers.
  
• Japan Specified Skilled Worker Visa (SSW): Launched in 2019, the SSW visa encourages skilled workers from abroad to contribute to various Japanese industries, from elderly care to manufacturing. Japan is targeting 800,000 SSW visas over the next 5 years, but the uptake to date has been constrained by skills-testing and Japanese language proficiency requirements. Efforts to expand, and finance, access to language training and skilling could significantly increase the visa’s attractiveness and utilization.
  

The Talent Mobility Fund is grateful to kickoff with support from a number of donors. We are looking for additional individual donors or institutions to join the Fund. Please contact our Head of Operations, Diane, to learn more about opportunities to contribute. 

The grants review and selection process will be managed by Amy Nice and Jason Wendle, with input from an advisory committee made up of domain area experts. All our grants are judged on the basis of a rubric. We use rubrics specific to our two tracks—the U.S. STEM Immigration and the Global Mobility track—depending on which track prospective grants aim to target. However, both rubrics evaluate proposals on the basis of four criteria:

• Alignment with Goals
  
• Scalability and Impact Potential
  
• Measurement of Success
• Likelihood of Success