Free The Comeback by Gary Shapiro Page B

from immigrants. Native Americans are less than 1 percent of the population.
    But that doesn’t mean that the United States has always been a welcoming country. Indeed, there are several moments in our history where a nativist surge helped stoke an anti-immigrant backlash. It’s also true that each wave of immigrants—Irish, Germans, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Asians—has confronted bigotry upon reaching our shores. So while we applaud ourselves for being an “immigrant nation,” we often forget just how hard it was for many of our forefathers when they first arrived.
    But that’s part of the immigrant spirit, isn’t it? They don’t come here for the
guarantee
of a better life. They come here for the
opportunity
for a better life. And whatever bigotry or nativist reactionthey find, they endure because, in the end, it’s infinitely better than what they left behind. They believed in a better future for their children—and almost all of them suffered so their children could have it better.
    My wife’s parents are great examples. They were trained as doctors in Communist Poland. In 1969, they escaped Poland to come to the United States with their then-five-year-old daughter (my future wife) to give her a better life. Penniless, they settled in the slums of Detroit. They had to learn English and retake their medical certification tests. They struggled for years but succeeded as physicians. Their daughter was valedictorian of her high school and now practices medicine as a talented retina surgeon, developing and implementing procedures that restore vision. (She’s also a wonderful wife and mother.)
    Clearly, my life is better off because they settled here. But so is our nation. You will find no more patriotic Americans than my wife and her parents. Indeed, my experience has been that almost all immigrants, from the innovators to the professionals to the cab drivers, are extremely patriotic and appreciative of what a gift it is to live here.
    But maybe it is we who should be thanking them. Foreign-born innovators represent a substantial portion of the American economy. A 1999 University of California, Berkeley study found that Chinese and Indian engineers ran 24 percent of U.S. technology businesses started between 1980 and 1998. Following this study, the Kauffman Foundation investigated the matter further. In 2009, they released their results:
    We found that the trend [the UCB study] documented had become a nationwide phenomenon. According to the studies, in a quarter of the U.S. science and technology companies founded from 1995 to 2005, the chief executive or lead technologist was foreign-born.In 2005, these companies generated $52 billion in revenue and employed 450,000 workers. In some industries, the numbers were much higher; in Silicon Valley, the percentage of immigrant-founded startups had increased to 52 percent. Indian immigrants founded 26 percent of these startups—more than the next four groups from Britain, China, Taiwan, and Japan combined.
    These immigrant founders tended to be highly educated—96 percent held bachelor’s degrees and 74 percent held graduate or postgraduate degrees, with 75 percent of these degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-related fields. The vast majority of these company founders didn’t come to the United States as entrepreneurs—52 percent came to study, 40 percent came to work, and 5.5 percent came for family reasons. Only 1.6 percent came to start companies in America.
    Even though these founders immigrated for other purposes initially, they typically started their companies just 13.25 years after arriving in the United States. And, rather than settling in well-established immigrant gateways, such as New York or Los Angeles, they moved to a diverse group of tech centers across the country and helped fuel their growth. 28
    Although remarkable, these results are not surprising. During the last half of the twentieth century, almost every top student