The new visa will also ease the threshold demanded by the E-B5, which attracts the wealthiest investors and not necessarily the most entrepreneurial.

Edwin Rivas, an economics senior at Southern Methodist University and an international student from El Salvador, will graduate this month and has come up with a fat list of business ideas he wants to pursue. But current visa options were either too expensive or too restrictive, Rivas said.

So he has decided to take his business ideas to El Salvador, even as he admits the business climate there is less favorable. “The startup visa is exactly what I have been hoping for, but it’s too late for me,” he said. “I wish it passed while I was still in school.”

Nezar Chafni, an SMU finance senior from the United Arab Emirates who will also graduate this month, secured an American job through the H-1B visa. Instead, Chafni plans to go back to his native country to launch a software company he founded here. “If I get something like the startup visa, I would move the company back here,” he said. “I already have people who are investing in my company.”

According to Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a research collaboration of the London Business School and Babson College, U.S. entrepreneurialism is on the wane. In 2009, just 8 percent of U.S. residents launched new companies, down from 12.4 percent in 2005. During the same time frame, the percentage of new entrepreneurs in 53 foreign countries grew from 8.7 percent to 11 percent.

Jaime Ramon, an employment-law attorney at Dallas, Texas-based K&L Gates, said he thinks the startup visa could be a good alternative to the existing visas, but it needs a little more scrutiny. The drop in the minimum investment prerequisite from $1 million as required by the E-B5 to $250,000 could potentially attract illegitimate businesses, Ramon said.

“Overall, if you monitor it and set up standards for the type of business that would be authorized, it would be a good thing,” he said.

LinkAmerica’s Ruza says the startup visa could help attract the best minds from all over the world to North Texas. “America is about innovation. That’s what makes us powerful and technologically advanced,” he said. “This is the land of opportunity.”