During the Obama administration, lawmakers began pushing for a start-up visa and seemed to be gaining some traction. In August 2016, the Obama White House announced the Department of Homeland Security would propose the International Entrepreneur Rule. Hillary Clinton advocated for a start-up visa as part of her platform. Now, the death of the International Entrepreneur Rule—and, relatedly, the stalling of the start-up visa—have foreign-born entrepreneurs in the United States grappling with whether to stick it out or just leave. Silicon Valley, too, is coming to terms with losing the competitive advantage it took for granted for so long. For some, it’s the latest evidence that Donald Trump, who became president on a promise to revive the American dream, is, in fact, chipping away at it.

In the early 2000s, a person I'll call Gyan (who requested that his real name not be used in order to protect his immigration status in the United States) considered his options. He could stay in his home country, in Asia, and pay to attend a top university, as most people do. Or he could go to the United States, where, he thought, he could create a path toward a better future. The decision was clear, and he came to the United States. Gyan applied to Stanford University, which offered him an excellent financial-aid package. He accepted immediately.

During Gyan’s senior year, an entrepreneurship class motivated him and two other students to start a company. Their product, a productivity tool, never took off, but the experience gave him the entrepreneurship bug. Gyan’s student visa allowed him to stay for a year after graduating to pursue practical training. So, he started working for various start-ups, practiced writing code in his downtime, and met fellow ambitious techies at cafes around Silicon Valley: Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View, Starbucks on Stanford Avenue.

Not being a U.S. citizen, Gyan stayed in the country by securing an employee-sponsored H-1B visa through a job as a software engineer. “Ultimately I think I was just really aching to make things happen, to build things,” he told me. He started to tinker with new product ideas after work.

Around that time, Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs started lobbying for a start-up visa. In 2010, Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar introduced the bipartisan Startup Visa Act, the first legislation of its kind to propose a visa category for international entrepreneurs. Recognizing the catch-22 of company founders being unable to sponsor themselves for visas, the act would allow a foreign-born entrepreneur to receive a two-year visa, and then be eligible for a green card, after proving job creation and acquiring $1 million in investment capital or revenue. The proposal was beloved within the tech community. But the bill, and subsequent iterations of it—including the popular Startup Act, which includes a start-up visa as part of other provisions aimed at helping the start-up industry—didn’t gain enough traction in Washington, D.C. “Nobody was committed to championing it,” said Craig Montuori, a partner at Venture Politics, a public-affairs consulting firm based in Silicon Valley, who lobbied for the start-up visa. Most people didn’t consider it a crisis; other foreign-born start-up founders had made it work, hadn’t they?