Introduction
Immigrant entrepreneurs and professionals contribute significantly to job creation and innovation in the United States. This analysis shows the striking propensity of immigrants to start and grow successful American companies, particularly in the technology field. The study's findings reflect the benefits of an open policy toward legal immigration. However, it also reveals that current restrictions on skilled immigrants are likely to result in less job creation and innovation for America.

This first of its kind study utilized the Thomson Financial database to examine the nativity of the founders of all U.S. venture-backed publicly traded companies. Separately, the authors surveyed over 340 privately held venture-backed companies to discern their views on U.S. immigration policy and obtain demographic data on their founders. The result is a portrait of the positive impact immigrants have in starting and working for America's leading edge companies.

American Made: The Impact of Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Professionals on U.S. Competitiveness, commissioned by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), is part of NVCA's MAGNET USA initiative. The report consists of three main sections. The first section provides data on publicly traded and privately held venture-backed companies. The second section provides the results of a recent NVCA survey on immigrant entrepreneurs and H-1B professionals. The third part presents U.S. government data highlighting the importance of foreign-born scientists and engineers in the United States. The study also showcases the extraordinary contributions of five immigrant founders of venture-backed companies from China, India, Israel, Lebanon, and Taiwan.

Key Findings on Immigrant-Founded Public and Private Venture-backed Companies

Immigrant-Founded Public Venture-backed Companies

• Over the past 15 years, immigrants have started 25 percent of U.S. public companies that were venture-backed, a high percentage of the most innovative companies in America.
• The current market capitalization of publicly traded immigrant-founded venture-backed companies in the United States exceeds $500 billion, adding significant value to the American economy. This is an example of the enormous wealth-creating abilities of immigrant entrepreneurs.
• Immigrant-founded venture-backed companies are concentrated in cutting edge sectors: high-technology manufacturing; information technology (IT); and life sciences.
• As evidence of how important immigrant entrepreneurs have been to the U.S. technology base, the study found 40 percent of U.S. publicly traded venture-backed companies operating in high-technology manufacturing today were started by immigrants. Moreover, more than half of the employment generated by U.S. public venture-backed high-tech manufacturers has come from immigrant-founded companies.
• The largest U.S. venture-backed public companies started by immigrants include Intel, Solectron, Sanmina-SCI, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Yahoo!, and Google.
• The data show immigrants possess great entrepreneurial capacity, particularly in technical fields. The proportion of immigrant entrepreneurs among publicly traded venture-backed companies is particularly impressive when compared to the relatively small share of legal immigrants in the U.S. population. Today, legal immigrants encompass approximately 8.7 percent of the U.S. population and represented only 6.7 percent of the population in 1990.
• Most venture-backed companies started by immigrant entrepreneurs are technology-related companies that pay high salaries for white collar professional positions but employ fewer people than, for example, venture-backed retail stores such as The Home Depot or Starbucks.
• Immigrant-founded venture-backed public companies today employ an estimated 220,000 people in the United States and over 400,000 people globally.
• While immigrant founders in venture-backed public companies come from across the globe, the leading countries of origin are India, Israel,
  and Taiwan.
• California is the leading state by headquarters for immigrant-founded venture-backed public companies, followed by Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, and Texas.
• A key lesson of the study is the importance of maintaining an open legal immigration system. Few of the immigrant entrepreneurs identified came to America ready to start a company capable of attracting venture capital. As the data, profiles, and interviews revealed, most entered the country either as children, teenagers, or graduate students, or were hired on H-1B visas to begin a first job while in their mid-twenties.

Immigrant-Founded Private Venture-Backed Companies

NVCA conducted a survey, with 342 respondents, to gather data on immigrant entrepreneurs at today's smaller, private venture-backed companies and to gain a wider perspective on company viewpoints on immigration.

• Looking to the future, among today's cutting edge privately held venture-backed companies, the percentage of immigrant founders remains as high, if not higher than their public counterparts. Of those responding to the NVCA survey, nearly half (47 percent) of the founders of private companies were immigrants.
• In one important indicator of the job creation abilities of immigrants, the NVCA survey found that almost two-thirds (66 percent) of the immigrant founders of privately held venture-backed companies have started or intend to start more companies in the United States.
• Immigrant-founded privately held companies in the survey held an average of 14.5 patents, with a median of four. This was slightly higher than the number of patents held by companies responding with exclusively U.S.-born founders.
• Private immigrant-founded venture-backed companies mirror public companies in their location and industry concentration, with 56 percent of the emerging companies headquartered in California.
• The top industry sectors for private immigrant-founded venture-backed companies were software, semiconductors, and biotechnology.
• India was the most common place of birth for foreign-born founders in the survey, followed by the United Kingdom, China, Iran, and France.
• Nearly all the immigrant founders in private companies (95 percent) would still start their companies in the United States if given the choice today.

Click here to download the PDF of the full report, "American Made."