Land Of Opportunity: In The US, Immigrants And Entrepreneurs Are Increasingly The Same
Knowledge@Wharton:
As an immigrant and entrepreneur, Vivek Wadhwa knows a lot of people like himself in the high-tech world of business. ‘If you work in technology, you see many Indian and Chinese faces,’ he says.
But when he set out to quantify the involvement of skilled immigrants in the fields of technology and engineering in the United States, even Wadhwa was surprised by what he found. ‘What started in Silicon Valley has become a nationwide phenomenon,’ he notes.
A new study by Wadhwa, an executive in residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, and a team of researchers found that 1 in 4 technology and engineering companies founded in the U.S. between 1995 and 2005 had at least 1 founder who was foreign-born. Many of them were 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. also are increasingly being named as inventors or co-inventors on patents, the study found.
‘This research shows that immigrants have become a significant driving force in the creation of new businesses and intellectual property in the U.S. – and that their contributions have increased over the past decade,’ the researchers concluded in their study titled, ‘America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs.’
Wadhwa, who came to this country from India in 1980 and founded 2 software companies before detouring into academics, began looking at the issue of skilled immigrants as part of a broader interest in globalization and U.S. competitiveness. ‘Everyone says the U.S. is losing its edge,’ he says. ‘We were trying to study the advantages the U.S. has… and skilled immigrants are one of those advantages. There is something unique to the U.S. to be able to bring in the world’s best and brightest.’
Still, ‘no one had quantified the contribution of these immigrants,’ notes Wadhwa, who is also a columnist for BusinessWeek online. ‘Everyone focuses on illegal immigrants. But no one is looking at legal immigrants, people who come in the front door and do things the right way and contribute to America’s competitiveness.’
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