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Immigrants and Jobs

It is clear that Donald Trump and the Republican Party hate immigrants, not just illegal immigrants, but legal ones too. But as a new study points out, this is highly ironic. Even though Republicans are also the party of big business, 45% of US Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants or their children employ 13.5 million people, and had $6.1 trillion in revenue last year.

Many companies founded by immigrants and their children are well known; for example, AT&T, Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Ford, Costco, Broadcom, and Intuit. What could be more American than blue jeans? However, they were created by two immigrants, Levi Strauss from Germany and Jacob Davis from Latvia, who founded Levi’s.

And that’s just big businesses. At the other end of the spectrum are new firms and startups, which all by themselves create nearly all net job growth in the US. And the facts show that immigrants are far more likely to be entrepreneurs that people born in the US.

The health of our economy has always — and continues — to depend on immigrants. We shouldn’t be telling immigrants and their children to go back to the country they came from, we should be welcoming them.

We are a country of immigrants, and we should start acting like it.

Otherwise, the US will surely decline. Coincidentally, just announced this morning is the new Fortune Global 500 list, which measures all corporations by revenue, not just those in the US. For the first time ever, China now has more companies on this list than the US. This is also the first time a nation other than the US has been at the top of the ranks of global big businesses.

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4 Comments

  1. Hassan wrote:

    Google (one of the founder)

    Monday, July 22, 2019 at 5:19 pm | Permalink
  2. Iron Knee wrote:

    Sergey Brin. Good point.

    The list wasn’t meant to be complete, but considering that I worked for Google for 5 years, I added them.

    It is interesting that the founders of Google originally tried to sell their idea to Yahoo! — but Yahoo! declined. And incidentally, one of the two founders of Yahoo! is also an immigrant (from Taiwan), and like the founders of Google, attended Stanford University.

    Monday, July 22, 2019 at 6:58 pm | Permalink
  3. westomoon wrote:

    The Trump Organization fits this definition too.

    None of Trump’s grandparents was born in this country, and only one of his parents. His four most visible children each have only one grandparent who was born in the US — that would be Daddy (KKK) Fred, whose parents were both immigrants. His wife does not speak intelligible English.

    I figure, Trump must be insecure about having such a very short US family history — that’s the only thing I can think of that would explain how THIS President, the child of an adult immigrant and the husband of two adult immigrants, the President with the most immediate family ties to foreign nationals of any in our history, that this President should be the one to declare all-out war on immigration itself. (Except, of course, for his in-laws, who are filtering their way in from Slovenia in real time.)

    Monday, July 22, 2019 at 8:21 pm | Permalink
  4. Wildwood wrote:

    Westomoon, look at the color of their skin.

    Wednesday, July 24, 2019 at 12:19 pm | Permalink

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