A study by professors at Kellogg University found that immigrants in the U.S. create more jobs than they take, a rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s claim that immigrants are stealing job opportunities from American workers.
“Ironically, the result is exactly the opposite of the usual narrative,” Ben Jones, a professor of strategy at Kellogg, said in a press release discussing the findings.
“It seems like immigrants actually improve the economic outcomes for native-born workers.”
Researchers analyzed three datasets to come to the conclusion that immigrants founded firms at a higher rate than native-born Americans.
They first drew from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database, which includes information on every new business founded between 2005 and 2010 that lasted at least five years — for a total of 1.02 million firms. They also looked at the 2017 Fortune 500 list and the U.S. Census Survey of Business Owners.
“This last approach allows us to really focus in on the very largest businesses in the economy. And, of course, these businesses are especially important,” said Jones, “because they employ so many people. One very large company employs far more people than a large number of relatively small companies. So we went through all the Fortune 500 companies using teams of research assistants, who traced back to the origin of the company to see who the founders were and whether they were U.S.-born or immigrants.”
The survey data found that 7.25 percent of immigrants were entrepreneurs, compared with about 4 percent of native-born individuals. Additionally, 0.83 percent of immigrants in the workforce between 2005-2010 started a firm, compared with 0.46 percent of U.S.-born individuals.
Researchers also found that immigrants founded firms of all sizes at a higher rate than those born in the U.S.
A motivating factor behind Trump’s policies on immigration, including a U.S.-Mexico border wall, more border patrol agents, and stricter deportation policies, is the belief that immigrants are “taking our manufacturing jobs” and “taking our money” as he said on the campaign trail in July 2015.
Jones says that argument appears “flatly wrong – immigrants are powerful job creators.”
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