What I'd prefer to see is a system similar to Canada's points system[1], which -- in summary -- gives you points for various qualifications, such as education, work experience, family ties, amount of capital you'd inject into the country, and various other metrics to decide whether allowing you into the country would be a benefit for society.
Special-casing startups wouldn't be needed -- you would get points for having investments into your company, and the skills needed to build it.
Normally, I wouldn't disagree, but this is an offshoot for supporting entrepreneurship. Also, the libertarian arguments are there for Startup Visa: keep the government out of picking winners and let VCs use market-based metrics to decide which foreign entrepreneurs should get visas.
Seems like this is getting a lot of support, though I do have some reservations. I don't really like the idea of allowing VCs to decide who is allowed to come to the US. Of course, I don't really like the idea that employers having this power either.
This could distort the market and suppress what I think is a very healthy trend toward bootstrapping in high tech. Not that bootstrapping is necessarily better than funding - in many cases, I'm sure it isn't. But the decision to accept funding (and the terms of that funding) should be based on what's good for the business, not whether the founders need a VCs permission to live in the US.
Obviously VCs are very relevant in software, but with the drop in cost of starting a business, software entrepreneurs may need them less and less... unless, of course, they need a visa. This will put VCs right back in the driver's seat, and let's not pretend this has anything to do with the market - it has to do with VCs gaining control over a government function (immigration) and potentially using it as leverage over entrepreneurs.
The US Chamber of Commerce is pretty much in bed with the oil/gas/"old energy" producers, which has caused a variety of tech companies to leave it because of it's environmental policies which were often in the global warming skeptic/denier camp - Apple left in 2009, for example:
The CoC's thing is helping its members make gobs of cash, and that's often a very bad thing because it comes at the expense of everyone and everything else. Tech is one of those weird cases where public and private interests frequently align naturally.
Special-casing startups wouldn't be needed -- you would get points for having investments into your company, and the skills needed to build it.
[1]http://www.workpermit.com/canada/points_calculator.htm