Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups
A year ago the statement &quot;Most high tech companies are founded by founded by First&#x2F;2nd gen immigrants&quot; was going around the various tech circles. In the thread at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9085970" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9085970</a> I dug into the numbers and found that that is what we would expect from population statistics. That is, immigrants and non-immigrants are equally likely to start high tech companies.<p>This new analysis - and yes, I read the report - does not attempt to assess if the numbers are more or less than expected. If a company has 10 founders and only one is an immigrant then that counts as one of the companies founded by an immigrant.<p>Let&#x27;s say that all 87 companies had 10 founders (which is obviously false, but I&#x27;m making a point about the limitation in the analysis), and of the 44 companies with an immigrant founder, all of them had only 1 immigrant founder. Then of the 870 founders, only 44 are immigrants, or 5%.<p>Immigrants make up about 13% of the US population. If only 5% of the founders are immigrants then that means immigrants are significantly less likely to start $1B valued companies than non-immigrants.<p>I&#x27;m going to go one step further. The report DID NOT include the overall number of founders, which makes it impossible to determine the significance of the findings. By classifying a company with a single immigrant founder as being founded by an immigrant, it almost certainly overemphasizes the impact of immigrant founders. I believe this was done deliberately, in order to influence matters regarding the H1B visa. I do not believe this to be an honest analysis.<p>FWIW, the author, Stuart Anderson, was former policy director of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, former director at the Cato Institute (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sourcewatch.org&#x2F;index.php?title=National_Foundation_for_American_Policy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sourcewatch.org&#x2F;index.php?title=National_Foundati...</a> ). Both are &quot;part of the stable of conservative think tanks&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sourcewatch.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Institution" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sourcewatch.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Alexis_de_Tocqueville_I...</a> .