Researchers found that immigrants not only expand labor supply as workers but also expand labor demand as founders of firms, and do so at much higher rates than their native-born counterparts.
Pierre Azoulay, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he and his co-authors had a "data window into entrepreneurship" that hadn't previously been available to researchers.
Between 2005 and 2010, 0.83% of immigrants in the workforce started a business, compared to 0.46% of native-born individuals; immigrants exhibit an 80% higher entrance rate into entrepreneurship, according to the research.
As business owners, immigrants are also more likely to employ other people, Azoulay said.
For each firm in the 2017 Fortune 500 ranking, the researchers looked at the founding year, founder names and founders' country of birth.
No matter the framework they looked at, though, the basic qualitative story stayed the same, Azoulay said.
The findings of this paper may help to resolve the tension between those two viewpoints, according to the researchers. »