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Policy Brief on Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Growth

Updated: Author: Alina Kanametova

Reference Samples 2 pages Anonymized Access on request

An educational policy brief from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation dated January 22, 2015 on immigrant entrepreneurs and U.S. economic growth. It reviews…

EB-2 NIW O-1 EB-1A Media about you Petition

About this document

An educational policy brief from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation dated January 22, 2015 on immigrant entrepreneurs and U.S. economic growth. It reviews federal, state, and local policy ideas for helping immigrant founders start and grow businesses, and it includes a comparison of startup visa rules in other countries. It also cites job, sales, and entrepreneur counts tied to immigrant-founded firms.

Key points

  • Immigrants are described as almost twice as likely as native-born Americans to start businesses.
  • Immigrant founders from top venture-backed firms are said to create an average of 150 jobs per company.
  • In engineering and high-tech, immigrant-founded firms employed about 560,000 workers and generated $63 billion in sales in 2012.
  • A startup visa is presented as one way to authorize non-citizens to start and run businesses, with benchmarks tied to investment, revenue, or jobs.
  • It notes DHS-administered CPT and OPT let foreign students and recent graduates work in related fields for up to twenty-nine months after graduation.
  • On November 20, 2014, the President directed DHS to make EB-2 and other skilled visa changes; USCIS was told to clarify national interest waivers so entrepreneurs can self-petition.
  • Massachusetts is described as running a 2014 pilot where university-affiliated centers employ resident entrepreneurs on an H-1B visa.

What is inside

  1. Federal innovation
  2. Foreign students as entrepreneurs
  3. Sample startup visa requirements
  4. Administrative action on immigration
  5. State-level innovation
  6. Local-level innovation
  7. For more information

When it helps

This brief serves as background evidence on the economic role of immigrant entrepreneurship and on policy mechanisms that could let entrepreneurs enter or stay in the United States. It also shows how the text links entrepreneurship to EB-2 national interest waivers and startup-style immigration ideas.

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