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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick holds a press briefing in Boston in January.

FORTUNE -- In America's battle to keep theforeign entrepreneurs it trains, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has thrown down a massive gauntlet.

Announcing a broad economic growth package last week, Deval introduced what he's dubbed the Global Entrepreneur in Residence (GER) Program. The proposal: Foreign students who attended colleges and universities in Massachusetts and are interested in staying in the state as entrepreneurs can apply to enroll in the GER program that will be administered by the Massachusetts Tech Collaborative, an independent state agency aimed at developing technology in Massachusetts. Mass Tech will then place selected individuals at participating public and private universitiesin the state, where they will work part-time and apply for visas that will be sponsored by their new employers.

The GER program is one way Massachusetts can "accelerate [its] job and wealth creation," Patrick, a Democrat, said in a statement. Greg Bialecki, Patrick's secretary of housing and economic development, told Fortune on Friday that "the drive behind this idea was international students who've come to Massachusetts; they've spent their school years here and want to stay here." At present, there are 46,000 foreign college students enrolled at institutions in Massachusetts, he says.

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Patrick's plan is simple enough, but addresses a critical problem facing the startup community and the economy as a whole: how to get foreign-born, U.S.-educated entrepreneurs to stay in the country.

Under current immigration law, foreign students can attend U.S. colleges and universities with a student visa, but once they graduate, they must find an employer to sponsor them for an H-1B visa designated for skilled foreign workers to stay in the country. The H1-B system disfavors entrepreneurs because, unlike the Microsofts and Facebooks of the world, startupstypically don't have an army of lawyers specially trained in immigration law. Andthe visa application requires a distinction between the employer and the employee; at startups, those are often one andthe same.

The visa application also requires that the employer prove that the sponsored employee is receiving the industry's prevailing wage, but oftentimes a startup founder is not paying himself anything and is instead working for a stake in future earnings, says Neil Ruiz, an associate fellow at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.

These factors are made all the more complicated by the limited number of H-1B visas available to private employers and the once-a-year application process. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on April 7 that it had received enough H-1B petitions to fill its 85,000 visa spots just five business days after it started accepting 2014 applications.

Patrick's proposal -- which will likely gain support from the state's Democrat-controlled Senate and House -- is aimed at making the visa process easier for entrepreneurs by getting around the H-1B cap through a loophole in the system. Institutions of higher learning are exempt from the H-1B visa cap and can apply for visas for their employees at any point throughout the year, which means foreign graduates who are employed by higher-ed institutions through Massachusetts's GER program would, in theory, have a much better chance of securing a visa then they would if they applied for one as part ofthe private sector.

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