Report: Immigrant Entrepreneurs Generate Jobs, Economic Growth

Small business often is touted as the greatest engine of job growth in the world’s greatest economy. A new study from New York’s Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI) shows just how much immigrant entrepreneurship contributes to U.S. job growth and our overall economic wellbeing.

The FPI study, entitled “Immigrant Small Business Owners: A Significant and Growing Part of the Economy,” was released in June 2012, and its findings may be startling news to those accustomed to the steady drumbeat of negative press about immigrants. (See Immigrant Small Business Owners, a Report from the Fiscal Policy Institute’s Immigration Research Initiative, June 2012.)

Some key findings:

• One in six small business owners in the United States is an immigrant.

• Immigrant small business owners employed 4.7 million people here in 2007 – the most recent year for which statistics are available – and generated over three-quarters of a billion dollars in revenues.

• 30 percent of small business growth was attributable to immigrants, in the years spanning 1990 and 2010.

• Immigrants make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population, but account for 18 percent of small business owners.

The study makes for fascinating reading, and provides a refreshing dose of cool, clear reality in the face of all that overheated anti-immigrant bluster.

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