Immigrants Founded More Than Half Of U.S. Unicorns, Study Reports

Just over half of the nation’s startup companies valued at $1 billion or more were founded by immigrants, according to a report released Thursday.

And the most immigrant-laden state – California – is the home to 32 of the 44 immigrant-founded companies in the study by the National Foundation for American Policy.

The study’s release comes in the midst of an anger-dominated presidential campaign in which much of the heat is fueled by anti-immigrant sentiment.

Study author Stuart Anderson, a top Immigration and Naturalization Service official early in President George W. Bush’s administration and now executive director of the non-partisan NAFP, said, “Immigrants play a key role in creating new, fast-growing companies, as evidenced by the prevalence of foreign-born founders and key personnel in the nation’s leading privately-held companies.”

Tech leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have lobbied for increasing the number of H-1B visas that admit skilled foreign workers into the country.

But Republican Donald Trump is leading his party’s race for president in a field of candidates almost unanimously opposed to immigration reform. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, second to Trump in the GOP delegate count, introduced a bill along with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), which would make it more difficult to get an H-1B visa, arguing that U.S. workers are displaced because companies can hire computer engineers from India at cheaper wages than what Americans would demand.

The NAFP study, which was based 87 $1 billion startups, or unicorns, as tracked by the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones VentureSource, revealed that 44 (51 percent) were founded by immigrants and that immigrant-founded unicorns created an average of 760 jobs each. A quarter of immigrant founders entered the United States on student visas.

Here are more of the report’s findings:

The 44 immigrant unicorn founders came from 21 countries led by India (14), Canada and the U.K. (8), Israel (7) and Germany (4). (Some companies had multiple founders from the same country).

California is home to 32 of the immigrant-founded companies, followed by New York (6), Massachusetts (4) and Illinois (2).

The largest immigrant-founded companies ranked by number of employees are SpaceX (Hawthorne, 4,000 employees), Mu Sigma (Chicago, 3,500), Palantir Technologies (Palo Alto, 2,000) and Zenefits (San Francisco, 1,465).

Of the 20 founders who came to the United States as students, six attended Stanford either as under-graduate or graduate students (Alexander Asseily of Jawbone, Amr Awadallah of Cloudera, Borge Hald of Medalia, Tomer London of Gusto and Eric Setton of Tango); four attended Harvard and two attended MIT.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal, Jody Meacham
Photo: Elon Musk of South Africa founded the largest (by number of employees) U.S. unicorn founded by an immigrant, Hawthorne-based SpaceX. (Dan Taylor)