June 2007
Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs "tracked the educational backgrounds of immigrant entrepreneurs who were key founders of technology and engineering companies from 1995 to 2005 [and showed] a strong correlation between educational attainment [especially in STEM fields] and entrepreneurship." Select findings include, "More than half of the foreign-born founders of U.S. technology and engineering businesses initially came to the United States to study … They typically founded companies after working and residing in the United States for an average of 13 years … On average, 31 percent of the engineering and technology companies founded from 1995 to 2005 in the 11 technology centers that were surveyed had an immigrant as a key founder. This compares to the national average of 25.3 percent …" Further illustrating the strong link between STEM education and immigrant entrepreneurship, the study found that "96 percent held bachelors degrees and 74 percent held graduate or post-graduate degrees … [and that] 75 percent of their highest degrees were in STEM fields …"
November 2006
National Venture Capital Association: Immigrant Entrepreneurs
American Made: The Impact of Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Professionals on US Competitiveness highlights U.S. job creation attributed to 'non-native born' entrepreneurs in the U.S., focusing on the economic impact of immigrant entrepreneurs as well as the impact of current immigration policy on that economic potential. The report concludes that the "[C]urrent market capitalization of publicly-trade immigrant founded venture backed companies in the U.S. exceeds $500 billion … [exemplifying] the enormous wealth creating capabilities of immigrant entrepreneurs. Today, immigrant founded U.S. publicly-traded companies employ 220,000 people in the United States and over 400,000 worldwide. Immigrants started over 40 percent of the venture backed U.S. public companies in technology manufacturing today." Some well-known examples of immigrant founded firms include Intel (Andy Grove, Hungarian), ebay (Pierre Omidyar, French), Google (Sergey Brin, Russian), Yahoo (Jerry Yang, Taiwanese), and the list goes on.
