Entrepreneur Sees Fellow MIT Grads Made to Leave the U.S. Due to Immigration Policies

Spanish-born Bernat Olle hopes to revolutionize healthcare by using microbes as medicine. Olle is the CEO and co-founder of Vedanta Biosciences, a Cambridge-based company whose technology alters how the trillions of microbes in our body interact with our immune system. “It’s a completely new way to approach medicine,” Olle says, and it could help treat conditions ranging from allergies to diabetes.

Olle came to the United States to pursue an MBA and a PhD in chemical engineering at MIT. There, he fell in love with the idea of starting his own company. And he eventually did. In fact, over the last decade, Olle has co-founded four companies and, in 2013, he was named Spain’s “Innovator of the Year” by the MIT Technology Review in its “Innovators Under 35” List. Each of Olle’s companies is developing a solution for a health problem, including balding and obesity, but Vedanta Biosciences may be one of the most consequential. “We think the microbiome field will eventually revolutionize medicine,” Olle says.

The current immigration system doesn’t just let this talent get away, it actually forces it to leave the country.

The rapidly growing Vedanta team is a diverse one, with employees hailing from the United States, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, Japan, Colombia, India, and Peru. Not surprisingly, Olle argues that for the United States to remain competitive in the global economy, it must attract—and retain—top talent from around the world. “But the current immigration system makes this very difficult,” Olle says. While his own journey from a J-1 visa for international research scholars to a green card was relatively simple, he knows this is not typical. “I know many talented people—friends and colleagues—who have had to leave the country because they couldn’t get visas,” Olle says.

The obstacles preventing talented international students from remaining in the United States are particularly detrimental, Olle argues. “We’re talking about some of the best prepared young people in the world, who are educated in the United States, and poised to become incredible entrepreneurs,” he says, “The current immigration system doesn’t just let this talent get away, it actually forces it to leave the country after graduation. It simply makes no sense.”