More than half of American unicorns have immigrant founders

In discussing the impact of immigration on the US economy and labor market, the effect of immigrant entrepreneurs is staggering: 55% of billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. And when you include companies in which immigrants have co-founded alongside native-born Americans, the total jumps to almost two-thirds, according to a new study.

"Immigrants have fueled the rise of billion-dollar startups," reads the study by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research institution that focuses in part on immigration issues. The proportion of unicorns founded by immigrants has remained remarkably stable compared to a study published by the organization four years ago, even though the number of unicorns has increased approximately sixfold during this period.

The study goes on to name the most popular unicorns with immigrant founders among the 319 unicorns founded by immigrants. You must have heard of them. Here are the biggest ones and their ratings:

SpaceX, $125 billion Stripe, $95 billion Instacart, $39 billion Databrick, $38 billion Epic Games, $31.5 billion Miro, $17.5 billion Discord, $15 billion

And because the study only counts unicorns that have yet to be made public, its findings actually underestimate the full impact of immigrants on the entrepreneurial landscape. The founders come from 57 countries; India, with 66, produced the most; the country also produced the most in the 2018 report.

As Wharton professor Ethan Mollick notes, it's not just unicorns either: "Immigrants start more businesses per person than native Americans and their businesses pay somewhat higher wages “, he wrote, citing other recent research.

And then there are the founders who are children of immigrants, which would add at least 51 unicorns to the total, according to the study.

About half of unicorn founding immigrants came to the United States on student visas.

All of these numbers raise questions about US immigration policy and immigration trends in recent years. The group of entrepreneurs who launched these unicorns arrived years ago (you don't launch a company that reaches a billion-dollar valuation in just a year or two, after all).

In recent years, the growth in immigration that the United States relied on to create these unicorns has slowed. Last year, for the first time in more than a decade, the percentage of the foreign-born population in the United States fell. People are less interested in coming to the United States, as shown by the fact that net immigration has fallen every year since 2016.

While the NFAP does not make policy recommendations per se, the organization includes a pair of policy briefs in its report. The first is for a start-up visa, which would allow entrepreneurs to stay in the country specifically to start and run businesses. Currently, if you have set up a business in the United States, there is no visa program to stay in the country as an entrepreneur. As a result, according to the report, "successful immigrant entrepreneurs in America are almost always refugees or family-sponsored and employer-sponsored immigrants."

The second NFAP policy memo relates to increasing the number of legal immigrants and expediting the processing of green card applications. As the report notes, “The Congressional Research Service estimates that the backlog of employment-based green cards for Indians could exceed two million by 2030. In the most recent year, United States rejected 82 people...