The Immigrant Entrepreneur contribution to United States of America

There have been constant debates over immigration policies of United States of America for last few years. I have heard good and bad theories on how immigration has affected US economy. Recently, I stumbled upon a very interesting survey done by a team of researches at Duke’s to quantify the involvement of skilled immigrants in the fields of technology and engineering in the United States.

The researchers found that of all the technology and engineering companies found between 1995 to 2005 in US, one out of every four founders was foreign-born, mostly from India and China. Nationwide, immigrant-founded companies generated $52 billion in sales in 2005 and employed 450,000 people. Non-citizen immigrants living in the U.S. are also the biggest chunk of inventors or co-inventors on patents.

The research covered total of 2054 companies, out of which at least 25.3% reported that one of their founders was an immigrant.

Immigrant-founded companies accounted for a large portion of the total in the key technology centers, including Silicon Valley (52%), New York City (44%) and Chicago (36%), according to the research. Immigrant founders scored the lowest in other technology clusters like Portland, Ore., (18%), Research Triangle Park (19%) and Denver (19%). 

Follwoing were the key findings of this research.

• Indians were the most dominant ethnic group, heading up 26% of the companies that were founded by immigrants.
• California led the way with immigrant entrepreneurs. There, 39% of tech companies were immigrant-founded. New Jersey was close behind, with 38% comapnies established by immigrants.
• Chinese were most likely to set up their companies in California. . Indian-founded companies were well represented in both California and New Jersey, while British entrepreneurs favored California and Georgia.
• In Florida, 35% of immigrant-founded companies were started by people from South America. In Massachusetts, Israelis were the biggest founding group, accounting for 17% of immigrant-founded startups. In New Jersey, Indians headed 47% of the new companies started by immigrants.
• Immigrants were most likely to start companies in the semiconductor, computer, communications and software fields. They were least likely to start companies in defense/aerospace and environmental industries.
• While immigrants are making their mark all over the country, Silicon Valley remains a hotbed of entrepreneurship. Just over 52% of start-up companies there had immigrant founders, with the highest proportion from India, followed by China and Taiwan.
• Immigrant non-citizens in the U.S. were either named as the inventor or co-inventor in 24.2% of patent applications filed in 2006. That’s a significant increase from 1998, when non-citizen immigrants accounted for 7.3% of patent applications.

Contrary to the lot of negative theories about legal immigration in America, this research suggests that immigrants have facilitated the US economic growth.

via: Wharton

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Author: Arun Prabhudesai

Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin or get in touch with him at admin-at-trak-dot-in or 91.9822575676.

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