Report Finds Immigrant Firms Contribute Much To Economy
Nov 17th, 2008 | By Dawn R. Rivers | Category: ResearchFar, far away from the increasingly xenophobic immigration debates that have peppered the political landscape in recent years, a simple factoid has intrigued economic researchers about the same group over the same period. Immigrants are 30 times more likely to start a business than native born citizens. In a new research report released last week by the SBA Office of Advocacy, Dr. Richard Fairlie develops a broad picture of these immigrant-owned firms in terms of business formation rates and performance.
Immigrants are about the only subgroup around that has roughly the same percentage of people in the workforce as they have members of the population of business owners, at 12.2% and 12.5%, respectively. In addition, they own 11.2% of all U.S. firms that make in excess of $100,000 in annual sales and represent almost 11% of all employer businesses. And yet, most of them are still microbusinesses: 93% of them have five or fewer employees, and almost 78% are nonemployers. And, while 19.7% of immigrant-owned firms earn more than $100,000 per year, 65.9% of them earn less than $50,000 per year. All of which reduces to the fact that perhaps immigrant owned firms are perhaps not so very different from the rest of us.
