Entrepreneurship
Are immigrants more likely to start businesses?
Yes. Immigrants are more likely to become entrepreneurs than U.S.-born Americans. Immigrants play an outsized role in business creation and are a crucial part of the U.S. economy.Today, immigrants make up 23.6% of all entrepreneurs nationwide, even though they account for just 14.3% of the U.S. population.
Immigrant entrepreneurs start businesses ranging from neighborhood small shops to some of the largest and most successful companies in the country, including a significant portion of Fortune 500 businesses. They create jobs, generate income, and contribute to economic growth in communities across the United States.
What kind of businesses do immigrants start?
Immigrants start businesses across virtually every sector of the U.S. economy. They are particularly prominent in industries including accommodations and food services, construction, professional services, transportation, retail, and healthcare.For example, immigrants make up one-third of entrepreneurs in the accommodations and food services industry, as well as 26.6% of entrepreneurs in construction.
Immigrant entrepreneurs also start and build companies that grow far beyond the small-business stage. Some of America’s best-known corporations — such as Amazon, Apple, NVIDIA, and Levi Strauss & Co. — were founded by immigrants or their children.
How many people do immigrant-owned businesses employ?
Immigrant-owned businesses provide millions of jobs for American workers. The latest data shows the significant role immigrant-owned and immigrant-founded businesses play in job creation.The impact is especially visible among the country’s biggest and most valuable companies. In the 2025 Fortune 500, a total of 231 companies — nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies — were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
These companies include businesses founded directly by immigrants as well as companies founded by the children of immigrants. Of the 231 New American Fortune 500 companies in 2025, 109 were founded by immigrants and 122 were founded by children of immigrants.
Do immigrants create jobs?
Yes. Immigrant entrepreneurs are job creators. New businesses are a major source of job growth in the United States, and immigrants play a particularly important role in business creation.Our research shows that immigrant-founded businesses often grow into major employers and economic engines. Nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, these companies employed more than 15.4 million people worldwide and generated $8.6 trillion in revenue in fiscal year 2024.
Immigrant entrepreneurship benefits more than the entrepreneurs themselves: immigrant-founded and immigrant-owned businesses create opportunities for workers, support local economies, and contribute to innovation and economic growth. They have been especially helpful as baby boomers retire, fueling growth in sectors that would have otherwise seen major declines.
How do immigrants contribute to America’s biggest companies?
Immigrants and their children have founded some of America's most influential companies — and their presence among the nation's largest businesses continues to grow.In 2025, 46.2% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, the highest share recorded by the Council since we began tracking immigrant-founded Fortune 500 companies in 2011.
Among the 14 companies appearing on the Fortune 500 for the first time in 2025, a total of 10 were founded by immigrants or their children. This included companies rising in the ranks of the Fortune 500, like Ace Hardware and Sirius XM Holdings.
Immigrant-founded and immigrant-descended companies are particularly prominent in major industries. They account for 80% of Fortune 500 companies in professional and other services, 65.6% in manufacturing, and 57.5% in information.
Why are immigrants more likely to become entrepreneurs?
There’s no single reason immigrants have higher rates of entrepreneurship. Starting a business can provide immigrants with an opportunity to use their skills in their new home, pursue economic mobility for themselves and their families, and serve needs in their communities.Immigrants also bring skills, knowledge, experiences, and connections from around the world. Their businesses range from local ventures to companies that operate on a global scale.
It’s worth noting, however, that the United States doesn’t have a dedicated visa specifically for immigrant entrepreneurs, despite relying heavily on their contributions. This gap can make it difficult for promising foreign entrepreneurs to establish and grow businesses in the United States — even when they have the resources and ideas to do so. Coupled with increasingly restrictive U.S. immigration policies, it has become even more difficult to drive international talent to this country.
Supporting immigrant entrepreneurs — and creating streamlined pathways that allow talented entrepreneurs to build and grow businesses in the United States — can help strengthen the U.S. economy, provide jobs to Americans, and build up local communities.
State Level Immigration Legislation and the Essential Economy
We often take for granted the important role “behind the scenes” workers – farm labor, restaurant work, and home health care – play in driving our economy. That’s one of the many conclusions of a new report from the Essential Economy Council, which studied the economic and social value of industries that make up what they have coined the “essential economy.” The report identifies six industrial sectors important to our daily way of life, including: agriculture and poultry; hospitality and restaurants; light construction and landscaping; personal care and assisted living; building maintenance and facilities service; and distribution and logistics. For the state of Georgia, the essential economy is a significant component of the state’s overall economy. In particular, the essential economy contributed 12 percent ($49 billion) to Georgia’s GDP in 2010; contributed over $114 million in sales tax in 2011; employed just under one million out of 3.7 million workers in Georgia in 2011; and is present in every country in the state. Read More
Skilled Immigrants Come Through All Immigration Channels
Note: Today’s blog features the oral testimony of Benjamin Johnson, Executive Director of the American Immigration Council before the House of Representatives, Committee of the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security today. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today and provide testimony on behalf of the American Immigration Council, a non-profit educational organization that for 25 years has been dedicated to increasing public understanding of immigration law and policy and the role of immigration in American society. Read More
Building Bipartisan Bridges in Congress for High-Skilled Immigration and Entrepreneurship
Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will hold a hearing to discuss, “Enhancing American Competitiveness through Skilled Immigration.” The hearing is likely to highlight both the bipartisan support for high-skilled immigration reform, and a series of new bills that would increase the supply of STEM visas. Read More
Business and Labor Announce Breakthrough on Immigration Reform
One of the most contentious issues that has stymied past immigration reform proposals is the divide between business and labor over how many and under what conditions the U.S. should admit new immigrants into our labor force. Also known as the “future flow” issue, the conflict lies in the tension between business’ desire to recruit foreign workers and labor’s desire to ensure workforce protections for those working in the U.S. Read More
Can A Nation Have Too Many Smart People?
A February 8 op-ed in the New York Times entitled “America’s Genius Glut” argues that America already has too many high-tech workers, and thus does not need more scientists and engineers from abroad. It is a surprising claim that is at odds not only with the empirical evidence, but is out of touch with the dramatic shift in recent years towards a knowledge-based global economy. The United States is not actually suffering from a surplus of intelligent people, nor is it being economically drained by the presence of intelligent people who were born in other countries. In fact, the U.S. high-tech economy would not exist in its present form if not for the contributions of innovators and entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe. Despite arguments to the contrary, scientists and engineers who come to this country on H-1B visas are an integral part of that high-tech economy. Read More
Survey: Asian Americans Concerned with Legalization, Family Backlogs
In the current debate, immigration is often depicted as a Latino issue. This is partially because just over half of America’s foreign-born population is from Latin America and the Caribbean, and the current political climate around immigration is largely seen as being driven by Latino turnout for Democrats in the 2012 election. But this depiction glosses over the millions of immigrants – documented and undocumented – who hail from other parts of the globe. Read More
Business and Religious Leaders Come Together to Champion Immigration Reform
Immigration reform is an undertaking of such importance that it should transcend partisanship. That was the fundamental message of the business and religious leaders who gathered together yesterday at a press conference organized by the National Immigration Forum. The press conference was part of a campaign called Forging a New Consensus on Immigrants and America, which describes itself as “a growing and diverse constituency of conservative, moderate and progressive leaders that is determined to go beyond the rhetoric and find common ground for practical solutions.” The event comes on the heels of an announcement late last week by Thomas Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that a broad coalition of business, labor, religious, law enforcement, and ethnic organizations has coalesced around the cause of immigration reform. Read More
Lawsuit Uncovers USCIS’ Double Standards in H-1B Program
For the past several years, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) H-1B visa review and processing procedures have caused confusion and concern among U.S. businesses that turn to highly-skilled temporary foreign workers in specialty occupations to operate successfully. In newly-uncovered documents, it appears that instead of supporting small businesses that attempt to hire highly-skilled foreign workers, in many cases, USCIS discourages their success by subjecting them to a near presumption of fraud. Read More
The U.S. Economy Still Needs High-Skilled Immigrant Workers
With the U.S. economy in the midst of a prolonged slump, it’s hard to believe that a labor shortage exists anywhere in the country. But that is precisely the case when it comes to the high-tech industries which depend upon highly skilled scientists and engineers. The United States has long faced a dilemma in this respect: the U.S. educational system is not producing high-tech professionals in numbers that are sufficient to meet labor demand. That is one reason so many U.S. scientists and engineers are immigrants. And it is one of the reasons that even more U.S. scientists and engineers would be immigrants if not for the arbitrary limits imposed by the U.S. immigration system. For the sake of the U.S. economy’s recovery and long-term competitiveness, lawmakers should revise the antiquated rules that currently govern how many and which high-tech professionals from abroad are allowed to work in the United States. Read More
America: Start-Up Nation of Immigrants
AOL co-founder Steve Case brought an important message to the National Strategy Session on Immigration in Washington, D.C. this week: America is a start-up nation. Over the last 200 years, America has built the most dynamic economy in the world through the hard work and innovation of its entrepreneurs. Read More
America's story is an immigrant story.
