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By Brian Friel, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Jan. 19, 2007

Jerry Yang was born in Taipei, Pierre Omidyar in Paris, and Sergey Brin in Moscow. Each immigrated with his family to the United States as a child. In the 1990s, Yang co-founded Yahoo!, Omidyar founded eBay, and Brin co-founded Google. Today, each of these immigrants is a billionaire. And their companies, which have a combined market value of $218 billion, are synonymous with entrepreneurship in the Internet Age.

That three of America's top business leaders in the 21st century are immigrants should be no surprise. Although they came here as children, they followed in the footsteps of Andrew Carnegie, Levi Strauss, and other famous immigrant innovators. Various studies show that people who come to this country tend to be self-starters who value education. They also are more likely to start businesses than are native-born Americans, the Missouri-based Kauffman Foundation found in its annual survey of entrepreneurship. In an average month of 2005, about 350 of every 100,000 legal immigrants started a business, compared with 280 of every 100,000 native-born Americans, the foundation reported.

The National Venture Capital Association, based in Arlington, Va., reported in November that immigrants were the driving force behind 25 percent of the venture-capital-backed public companies founded over the past 15 years. Forty percent of such companies in the high-tech manufacturing arena were founded by immigrants, the association reported.

As immigration has been debated in Congress over the past year, much has been made of the relative ease with which low-skilled workers sneak into this country. By comparison, little has been said about the highly skilled immigrants -- the world's best and brightest -- who come here legally to work and to innovate.

Indeed, nonnative students are far more likely than are their American-born counterparts to seek advanced degrees in fields that contribute the most to America's competitive edge in the global economy: science and engineering. Doctorates awarded in the sciences and in engineering reached an all-time high of 27,974 in 2005, a nearly 10 percent jump in four years, according to the National Science Foundation. Noncitizens account for 41 percent of those degrees and for nearly all of the growth in this decade. The venture-capital group found that nearly half of immigrant entrepreneurs came to the United States as students.

Highly skilled people around the world want to work here, if the backlog of applications in the nation's immigration bureaucracy is any indication. Take H1-B visas, which are temporary work passes for high-skilled foreigners. About 65,000 H1-Bs are available annually, and each year they have run out earlier and earlier: within the first five months of fiscal 2004, on the first day of fiscal 2005, two months before the start of fiscal 2006, and four months before the start of fiscal 2007. High-skilled workers seeking permanent residency have created a similar demand for green cards.

Even opponents of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants often support increasing the number of skilled workers allowed into the country. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who opposed the immigration bill that the Senate passed last year in part because it would provide new ways for illegal immigrants to become citizens, is pushing for more visas for skilled workers, particularly those with math, science, or engineering backgrounds. "We must attract people with those skills from abroad," Cornyn said at a May 2006 news conference. "We ought to be all about encouraging and incentivizing legal immigration."

Yang, the Yahoo co-founder, is among the business and education leaders who advocate making it easier for the world's most talented people to immigrate to America. "Whether they arrive as children, students, or professionals, we want the best and the brightest here," Yang said in November. "Our immigration policy should reflect that -- or these talents will go elsewhere."

The fact that demand to enter the country remains so high despite the bureaucratic hurdles is testament to the enduring draw of the American Dream. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

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