A new report from the Partnership for a New American Economy found more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Eighteen percent (or 90) of the 500 companies had immigrant founders. The children of immigrants started another 114 companies. (A copy of the report can be found here.)Via a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little more of...
One reason these figures are remarkable is that, according to the report, the foreign-born population of the United States has averaged 10.5 percent since 1850...
The report also notes, "Many of America’s greatest brands – Apple, Google, AT&T Budweiser, Colgate, eBay, General Electric, IBM, and McDonalds to name just a few – owe their origin to a founder who was an immigrant or the child of an immigrant.”
The list accompanying the research carries some surprising information, Steve Jobs, the famous co-founder of Apple, is a child of an immigrant parent from Syria. Walt Disney also was the child of an immigrant (from Canada), as well as the founders of Oracle (Russia and Iran). IBM (Germany), Clorox (Ireland), Boeing (Germany) 3M (Canada) and Home Depot (Russia).
11 June 2012
Regarding immigration policies
An interesting observation from an editorial in Forbes magazine last year:
The text notes that it is a strategic asset for a country viabilize the coming of ambitious immigrants. Such mode of thought tends to obscure the fact that the right to migrate is a human right, pure and simple.
ReplyDeleteUnless they were American Indians 100% of them were immigrants.
ReplyDeleteIt might be more helpful if they quoted meaningful statistics. It is not at all clear how the 40% of founders (being either foreign-born or having a foreign-born parent), can possibly relate to a 10% population, averaged since 1850, of foreign-born only. A meaningful statistic would compare figures from the times when the companies were founded, but even then, you'd have to know a lot of historical detail to properly interpret the data.
ReplyDeleteAnd now all those guys want to kick the ladder away from everybody else. Old as time.
ReplyDeleteIs immigrant being equated with poor, contextually? Because there is not much that is impressive about a rich family moving to a rich country to start a rich company...
ReplyDeleteAmericans are not against immigration, people. Just ILLEGAL immigration. Immigrants who are legal can benefit from our society but they also give back. Illegals take and, for the most part, don't give back much. It's not fair to ask Americans to finance what illegals take from us. There is a cost to having so many illegals on our soil. No other country in the world accepts to have as many, btw. Name one.
ReplyDeleteCanada takes way more per capita.
Delete"Illegals take and, for the most part, don't give back much."
DeleteHardly. One cannot take anything when forbidden from using public service, or give something back, when the government refuses to tax you and prefers to hunt you down.
You are reproducing propaganda made by people who want to criminalize migration of poor people as much as they criminalize blacks. States criminalize behavior that fit the purpose of the dominant class. Prohibition is an obvious exemple - you criminalize the behavior of the demographic you want to jail. This also serves to enlarge the profit margins of the security industry. Part of that profit is channeled into the fear industry that you consume.
I've told here the story of two siblings I know who live in the U.S.; him, a graduate student living on a brazilian scholarship, filling for a permanent visa; her, an illegal housekeeper, who got into your country 15 years ahead, helped him settle and still supports the brother. She's as hard a worker as he is. But why couldn't she take a plane to visit her brother when he was awarded in a competition earlier this year?
Illegals live in fear and reclusion, are abused at work because they can't sue, suffer extorsion from criminals and corrupt public agents and can't call the police. But their situation serves a purpose: they provide cheap labor, because they have no rights. Ask yourself your generation have access to cheap homework that your parents couldn't dream about - housemaids, gardeners, babysitters - works you used to do when you was underaged... this same kind of work is cheap and accessible to the middle class in any underdeveloped country, for the same reason it is now in the U.S.: because there is a swarm of people without access to justice who will work for nothing. Criminalization of migration is making America sink into a third world society.
Well said! I worked with many undocumented children when I was teaching, and found the families to be very hard working, and wanting a better life for their children. That's why they came here! The INS broke into the house of one of my student's aunt and uncle and abducted him 4 days after he turned 18. He learned English well enough in 1 1/2 years to get A's in all his high school classes. Even though his family lived in Mexico, he was deported to El Salvador because he was born there. I'm still furious about it. And that's only one case.
DeleteFor everyone who says they are against ILLEGAL immigration, would you support a big expansion of immigration quotas so that the immigrants coming here do so LEGALLY?
ReplyDeleteDo you even know what the current quotas are? Here are the number of LEGAL immigrants that the USA (population: ~300 million) allows each year:
Family-based green cards: 226,000
Employment-based green cards: 140,000
Green Card Lottery: 55,000
Refugees: 90,000
Special Immigrant Status (clergy, doctors, etc): 10,000
Total: 521,000 immigrants annually. That amounts to 0.17% of our population.
Seems like we could and should multiply that by a factor of 10.