US immigrants create more jobs than Americans, study shows

Comments by Sanwar Ali:

Immigrants moving from one Country to another are more likely to be entrepreneurial.  To start a business is difficult and risky.  It means a lot of hard work.  Long, long hours.  Perhaps no holiday.  Most people would like the relatively more comfortable existence of working for someone else.

Migrants create more jobs which is badly needed at the moment.  There are numerous examples of top immigrant entrepreneurs including Sergey Brin of Google/Alphabet, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla, and Jerry Yang founder of Yahoo.  Immigrant entrepreneurs make America great. Trump should remember that when he considers imposing ever harsher immigration policies.

There are limited options for migrants to be able to start a business in the US.  The E2 visa is only available for certain nationals.  Chinese and Indian nationals unless they can obtain another nationality cannot apply under E2.   For the L1 visa you will need to have a business abroad already employing a number of staff.  The EB5 immigrant investor visa category requires an investment of $900,000.   Some migrants already in the US may be able to come under an employment based immigrant visa.  However, Green Card processing can take a number of years.

Amid Donald Trump’s US work visa crackdown, under the guise of ‘protecting American workers’, a new study shows that immigrants in the US are more likely to be ‘job creators than job takers’. More than 40 million US job losses have occurred during the pandemic, according to Department of Labor data.

For several years, Trump has plugged his ‘Buy American, Hire American’ rhetoric, clamping down on a host of US work visa categories, including the popular H1B and L1 visa routes, to stem the flow of migrant labor into the US. Trump’s hardline tactics have been blasted by US businesses and immigrants rights’ groups.

Immigrants 80% more likely to be entrepreneurs

However, a new study carried out in July, shows that immigrants are 80% more likely to be entrepreneurs than natives in the US.

Study author and assistant professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Daniel Kim, said: “This is not just small businesses like restaurants and laundromats, but also high-growth ventures like Tesla and Google that go on to create thousands of jobs.”

The study, authored by Kim and Pierre Azoulay (professor at MIT), Benjamin Jones (professor at Northwestern Kellogg), and Javier Miranda (economist at US Census), has been published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

The study shows that companies started by immigrants create 42% more jobs than businesses established by Americans, which is the case for all business sizes.

Washington DC-based libertarian think tank CATO institute explained that: “The impulse to close the US immigration system to protect jobs for American citizens is known as the lump of labor fallacy, which is a fundamental misconception that there is a fixed amount of work in a society.”

“Believers in this fallacy apply it to US immigration by arguing that any job held by an immigrant could be held by an American citizen, but this just simply isn’t true. The number of jobs available depends on a myriad of economic factors and is never stable,” the think tank added.

Immigrants are Job creators

In terms of job creation in the US, the study found the data to be far more favorable toward immigrants. Kim said: “Immigration is a two-pronged input to our economy; we cannot have the successful immigrant entrepreneurs without taking on the immigrant workers. Thankfully, by the numbers, the first seems to far exceed the latter.”

Details of the study come as Trump eased some of the restrictions of his work visa ban. Workpermit.com recently reported that several restrictive measures had been lifted under ‘national interest exceptions’.

Certain exemptions to the work visa ban were applied across the H1B, H2B, J1, L1A and L1B visa categories, plus dependent visa schemes such as the H4, L2 and J2. US visa applicants who think they qualify for an exemption to Trump’s work visa ban under national interest rules, can request a visa application appointment at their nearest Embassy or Consulate.

Workpermit.com can help with US employment-based visas

If you would like to apply for a US work visa – including L1 visas, E2 visas, O1 visas and H1B visas - Workpermit.com can help. 

Workpermit.com is a specialist visa services firm with over thirty years of experience dealing with visa applications. We can help with a wide range of visa applications to your country of choice. Contact us for further details.  You can also telephone 0344 991 9222.