By Jon Feere on January 13, 2025
Mass immigration advocates, business groups, and cheap-labor lobbyists launched a misleading talking point years ago that continues to be repeated to this day. The claim is that somewhere around 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies — the largest companies in the United States by total revenue — were founded by immigrants. Open-border activists and lazy reporters pushing this narrative often simplify the talking point to “immigrant-founded companies”, despite the fact that the 40 percent figure includes companies founded entirely by native-born American citizens with an immigrant parent. A closer look at this claim reveals that hardly any Fortune 500 companies were founded solely by immigrants. Some were jointly founded by Americans and immigrants and the overwhelming majority were founded by U.S.-born, U.S. citizens. Ultimately, the misleading claim tells us nothing about what immigration policy should be, and it certainly is not an argument for the mass immigration policies, and illegal alien amnesties, demanded by the report’s anonymous authors.
This claim was first made in a 2011 report by a now-defunct group called Partnership for a New American Economy, which described itself as a “group of over 250 business leaders from all sectors of the economy and mayors from across the country”. Started by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chairs included Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger, Marriot CEO Bill Marriot, Jr., News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and others who benefit from mass immigration.
The group was launched in 2010 for the purpose of pushing amnesty for illegal aliens and massive increases in cheap foreign labor at the request of corporations. Its website announces that in December 2021 the group “merged” with (read “absorbed by”) the American Immigration Council (AIC), an activist group created by the American Immigration Lawyers Association in 1987.
One result of the merger is that AIC is now publishing the Fortune 500 immigrant founders claim on its website. This claim has generally been republished annually, and though it’s described as a report, it’s often been nothing more than a new link to an older report (i.e., the 2023 version was just a webpage linking to the old 2011 report with a handful of new paragraphs and graphics). The 2024 version follows the same pattern — it’s a single webpage with claims and graphics.
The analysis below breaks down the misleading nature of the Fortune 500 claim, which even PolitiFact has been skeptical about, calling the methodology “tricky business” and labelling the claim only “half true” — which is, itself, an odd way of describing the situation. How can it be “half false” that 40 percent of these companies were founded by immigrants? Either it’s true or it’s not true. Turns out, it’s just not true.
A Silly Claim from the Outset
The purpose of the Fortune 500 claim is to spread the narrative that foreigners are inherently entrepreneurial and that without increased immigration America’s economy would suffer. The goal of the groups pushing this claim is obtaining large amounts of cheap foreign labor to write code for their tech companies and wash bed linens at their hotels. In no instance are the authors of this report calling for a more focused, tighter immigration policy that limits admissions to only the true geniuses around the globe. Yet their report often highlights unique and successful inventors and creators as justification for bringing more unskilled and moderately skilled foreign labor into the United States. The report essentially argues that the success of Alexander Graham Bell, born in Scotland in 1847, is reason enough to today give Mariott an endless supply of foreign housekeepers who will work for low wages.
The report looks at the companies that make up the Fortune 500 list, and then breaks them into two portions. The first portion is what they consider companies founded by U.S. citizens (or “non-New American Fortune 500 Companies”), which is made up of companies founded by U.S.-born, U.S. citizens whose parents were also born in the United States.
The second portion is what they consider immigrant-founded companies (or, “New American Fortune 500 Companies”), which they define as: (1) companies founded by a U.S.-born, U.S. citizen who has a parent born overseas; or (2) companies founded by a mix of co-founders where some of the co-founders are U.S. citizens and at least one of the co-founders is either a U.S. citizen who has a parent born overseas or is, himself, foreign-born; or (3) companies founded entirely by founders born overseas.
As to the second portion, AIC takes the position that the breakdown of citizenship amongst a group of founders is irrelevant; if a company has five founders, four of them U.S. citizens and one of them foreign-born, that counts as an immigrant-founded company. And to be clear, a company with five founders, all of whom are born in the United States, is still an “immigrant-founded company” if one of these U.S.-born founders had one parent born overseas.
The goal is to trick the casual reader into thinking that around 40 percent or more of Fortune 500 companies were founded solely by people who immigrated to the United States. That’s just not accurate, but AIC is fine with that false narrative spreading throughout the media; in fact, that’s the goal of the intentionally misleading framing.
AIC could simply have run the numbers on Fortune 500 companies actually founded solely by foreign-born individuals, but apparently decided it wasn’t large enough to be persuasive. To be sure, there are some Fortune 500 companies that can trace their origins solely to founders who actually immigrated to the United States, but the number appears small.
AIC does report in its latest analysis, that of the Fortune 500 companies, a total of 108 “had immigrant founders” and 123 had U.S. citizen founders that are/were children of immigrants. However, even of those 108 companies that had immigrant founders, many of those companies were jointly founded by immigrants and the native-born. Again, AIC does not report the numbers of Fortune 500 companies founded solely by foreign-born individuals, but perhaps it will one day reveal those numbers.
Only about 20 Percent Have Immigrants Among the Founders
The only version of this Fortune 500 claim that is an actual, reviewable report is the original 2011 version which comes in at 43 pages (compared to the simple web page that contains the claim today). In the original report, the authors claimed that 90 of the Fortune 500 companies are “immigrant-founded”, putting the percentage of immigrant-founded Fortune 500 companies at 18 percent. In its most recent update, AIC celebrates that the number has gone up and that, as of 2024, a total of 108 Fortune 500 companies “had immigrant founders”, putting the percentage with immigrant founders at just under 22 percent.
To be clear, this is not a measurement of companies that were founded solely by immigrants. This is a measurement that includes (1) companies that have a mix of founders, meaning multi-founder companies where some are U.S.-born and some are foreign-born, and (2) companies that were founded solely by immigrants. As explained in the original report, the “immigrant-founded Fortune 500 companies” are those that “had at least one immigrant founder”. As explained above, a company with five founders, four of whom are native-born U.S. citizens and one of whom is foreign-born, would be counted as an “immigrant-founded company”.
In other words, about 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies (depending on the year) were founded solely by native-born Americans. Put differently, about 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies had zero immigrant founders. The remaining 20 percent had a mix of native- and foreign-born founders.
Again, the report’s authors have not tallied how many Fortune 500 companies were founded solely by immigrants, likely because the number is unremarkable.
Amazingly, as contorted as the analysis is, the underlying data is also not very reliable because of ambiguity regarding who actually founded some of these companies. The report’s author admitted to PolitiFact that the report is based on messy metrics: “We let the companies draw the line (about who was the founder) with their own narratives. The reality is, it’s hard to make a decision about how to do this in a fair way.” Perhaps the most honest approach would be to start with just reporting the number of companies actually founded solely by an immigrant. But the authors of this claim don’t seem interested in an honest narrative.
Why Not “Founded by Great-Great-Grandchildren of Immigrants”?
After apparently discovering that few Fortune 500 companies were founded solely by immigrants, the authors of this claim decided to inflate the number by adding companies with 100 percent U.S.-born founders to the “immigrant-founded” column, sometimes referring to them as companies “with immigrant roots”, if at least one of the U.S. citizen founders had a parent born overseas. But once these activists started playing this game, why stop at foreign-born parents? Why not describe Fortune 500 companies as “immigrant-founded” if the grandparents of the founders were born overseas? Or for that matter, why not describe any Fortune 500 company as having “immigrant roots” if its founder had great-grandparents born overseas? With enough work, cheap labor lobbyists can get that percentage way up, and eventually write:
Nearly 100% of American companies are founded by immigrants (or their children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or great-great-grandchildren, or great-great-great-grandchildren)!
Even putting aside the desperate and questionable metrics, the report is not very interesting, which becomes even more obvious when looking at the other half of the metric they’ve created. Even using AIC’s own messy and misleading calculations, every year it has reported that 54 to 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by U.S.-born U.S. citizens whose parents were also born in the United States. Is that statistic at all interesting? What is it supposed to mean in the context of the immigration debate? Though the report never actually highlights the U.S.-born side of the calculation, it’s arguably just as meaningless as the report’s actual headline.
More than anything, this “Fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrants” claim offers a transparent study in how activist groups in Washington, D.C., openly manipulate facts to push an agenda. It’s also helpful in revealing which news outlets lazily repeat lobbyist talking points, e.g., “Immigrants Founded Nearly Half of 2018’s Fortune 100 Companies, New Data Analysis Shows” (Fortune.com) or “The Foreign 500: American brands, built by immigrant entrepreneurs” (WashingtonPost.com).
A Historical Review
As explained above, the authors of the “immigrant founders” claim do not report how many of these companies had only immigrants as their founders, but their attempts to mislead know no bounds.
The latest versions of the list of companies reviewed by AIC are not user-friendly and don’t contain the names of the founders (as determined by AIC), making it difficult to check the work. This is probably by design. But the original 2011 version has a list of Fortune 500 companies broken down by “Companies with Immigrant Founders” and “Companies with Child-of-Immigrant Founders”. Using this table as a guide reveals the convoluted nature of this report even more clearly.
General Electric. When Politifact highlighted the many problems with the report, it raised the issue of how the authors contorted history to meet their claims, writing:
General Electric is another example of the ambiguity involved in determining the role of immigrants. The company is listed as founded by the child of an immigrant, Thomas Edison. Born in Ohio, Edison was the son of Samuel Edison of Canada, who emigrated to the U.S. after he took part in the failed Mackenzie Rebellion of 1837. But Edison was also the son of Nancy Matthews Elliot, who was born in New York.
So Edison, a U.S. citizen born in Ohio to a U.S. citizen mother born in New York, is considered to be an “immigrant founder” of General Electric because his father was born in Canada and moved to the United States a decade before Edison’s birth.
But Politifact didn’t go far enough. Was Edison really the founder of General Electric? Not according to General Electric. The company was a merger of Edison General Electric and the Thomson-Houston Company, meaning that General Electric was possible because of companies founded by four people, three of whom were born in the United States: Thomas Edison, Charles Coffin, and Edwin Houston. The lone foreigner was Elihu Thomson, born in England in 1853. He moved to Philadelphia with his family at age five. Does a child’s move to the United States before the Civil War tell us anything about what good immigration policy should be today? Not really. But AIC is effectively arguing that the United States should admit millions of foreign workers at the request of Silicon Valley billionaires because five-year-old Elihu Thomson moved from England to Philadelphia 1858.
Verizon. As another example, Verizon, founded in 2000, is counted as an immigrant-founded company because Alexander Graham Bell (born in Scotland in 1847) jointly founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877 with Gardiner G. Hubbard (the Boston-born trustee and president) and Thomas Sanders. Later, Bell created the American Telephone and Telegraph Company to handle long-distance calls, and it stayed in business as a monopoly until broken up in 1984, creating several so-called Baby Bells, including one called Bell Atlantic. Years later, in 2000, Bell Atlantic merged with GTE Corporation to form Verizon.
These are the steps one must go through to conclude that Verizon is an “immigrant-founded” company. Laughably, Politifact notes that the report’s authors went with Bell “because the report’s authors couldn’t identify anyone else as a founder” of Verizon. Also illustrating the convoluted and misleading nature of this report is the fact that it lists Bell as the founder of two Fortune 500 companies — AT&T and Verizon — meaning that he’s counted twice in the grand total. Again, it must be asked: How useful is this convoluted corporate history in informing Americans about what our nation’s immigration system should look like in the 21st century?
United Technologies. Another top company listed is United Technologies, founded in 1975, and the report’s authors list its “immigrant founder” as Igor I. Sikorsky, an aviation pioneer born in Russia in 1889. But it’s not that straightforward and even Sikorsky probably wouldn’t agree with being labeled the founder of United Technologies, since he died three years before it was founded. A little bit of history is necessary to unwrap this claim.
A number of aviation-focused companies were launched in the 1920s, from airplane and engine manufacturers to airlines. One of these was the Sikorsky Aviation Corporation, which Sikorsky founded in 1923, and he can certainly be credited as the founder of the company that bears his name.
In 1929, the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation was formed, combining airplane and engine manufacturing companies with an operating airline. According to AmericanBusinessHistory.org and Wikipedia, the founders of the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation were American aviation pioneers William Boeing (born in Michigan in 1881) and Frederick Rentschler (born in Ohio in 1887). This consolidated company included Pacific Air Transport, Chance Vought Corporation, and eventually the Hamilton Propeller Company, the Stearman Aircraft Company, and Sikorsky Aviation. Other companies were folded in as well.
After the Air Mail Scandal of 1934, the U.S. government decided that large holding companies like United Aircraft and Transport were anti-competitive, so new anti-trust laws were used to break the company into three parts: the Seattle-based Boeing Airplane Company, which focused on manufacturing west of the Mississippi River; the Chicago-based United Air Lines, which focused on airline interests; and the Connecticut-based United Aircraft Corporation, which focused on manufacturing east of the Mississippi River. The east coast company United Aircraft was made up of Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, Vought, and Hamilton Standard Propeller Company.
Flash forward to 1974 when American business manager Harry Gray became the CEO of United Aircraft and changed the name to United Technologies Corporation in 1975 as part of a plan to diversify the company into other fields. The Russian immigrant Igor Sikorsky, who AIC cites as the founder of United Technologies, died in 1972 before United Technologies even existed. Can a person who died before a company was created really be considered the founder of that company?
Yes, Sikorsky founded a company that was folded into a conglomerate that was later expanded to include other large companies that have nothing to do with aviation (United Technologies expanded into HVAC systems, elevators, industrial products, etc.). But how far does this go? In 2020, United Technologies merged with the Raytheon Company to form Raytheon Technologies (the name was changed in 2023 to RTX). Does that mean that Sikorsky is “the founder” of Raytheon Technologies and RTX, a new company that was created 48 years after his death? No rational person would think this, but apparently AIC does, and it’s central to its claim about immigrants founding Fortune 500 companies.
Kraft Foods. Compare this to Kraft Foods, founded by Canadian immigrant James L. Kraft, born 1874, who came to the United States in the early 1900s. This is a company that really was founded by an immigrant, not through some conglomeration, not by a group of people one of whom was an immigrant, not by a person born in the United States who had a parent born overseas. Around 1914, he founded the J.L. Kraft & Bros. Company, which later became Kraft Foods. But it starts to get a little complicated when discussing today’s version of the company.
Because the precise dates of Mr. Kraft’s life are somewhat in dispute, with different sources having different birthdates, I went to the Kraft Heinz Company website — which is the merged company founded in 2015 — to get some clarity. Oddly, the site has no reference to any original founders on its website. It’s the Kraft Heinz Company that is the Fortune 500 company that AIC counts as “immigrant-founded”, yet the company itself is apparently not interested in promoting that narrative. Maybe that’s because the people responsible for launching the Kraft Heinz Company in 2015 don’t think of it as an “immigrant-founded” company.
The Kraft Heinz Company was formed in 2015 by a merger of two companies: Kraft Foods and the H.J. Heinz Company. The latter company was founded by Henry J. Heinz, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1844. This means that the Kraft Heinz Company was founded in 2015 by merging two companies, one founded by an immigrant and one founded by a native-born American. Does that really make the Fortune 500 Kraft Heinz Company an immigrant-founded company?
While the underlying Kraft Foods honestly can be counted as an “immigrant-founded company”, it no longer exists. Kraft Foods is not a Fortune 500 company; it’s defunct. And Mr. Kraft, who died in 1953, is not the founder of the Kraft Heinz Company. But according to AIC, he’s the founder of a merger that occurred 62 years after his death.
Do Americans Even Like These Companies?
The subtext of this “immigrant founders” claim is that all of these Fortune 500 companies are wonderful contributors to American society. The authors of this report are likely liberal, open-border types, most of whom would probably not consider themselves to be pro-corporate. But the report is a good reminder that it’s the cheap-labor-seeking corporations who fund these self-described “pro-immigrant” groups, meaning they really are corporate lobbyists, first and foremost.
Notably, the promoters of the claims in this report rarely mention the companies on the list by name. A quick glance of the alleged immigrant-founded companies perhaps reveals the reason why. For example, here’s a headline the report’s authors could run with, but won’t: “Did you know that in addition to being one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, Northrop Grumman is an immigrant-founded company?”
For the record, Leroy Grumman was born in New York and Jack Northrop was born in New Jersey, both in 1895. Both men founded separate companies — the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Company and the Northrop Corporation — and the co-founders of each company were all born in the United States. In 1994, decades after their founding, the companies joined to become Northrop-Grumman. Some of the U.S.-born founders of the original Grumman company had parents born overseas sometime in the mid-1800s. There’s no evidence anyone working at Northrop Grumman ever described the company as “immigrant-founded”, and AIC certainly didn’t care to ask.
Here’s another headline that the report’s authors and promoters don’t seem to be using: “Did you know that in addition to filing for bankruptcy, shuttering all of its stores, and leaving shareholders with worthless stock, Bed Bath & Beyond was an immigrant-founded company?”
Of course, Bed Bath & Beyond going defunct (and falling off the Fortune 500 list) doesn’t really tell us anything about the value of immigration any more than it would if the company was the most successful company in the world.
As another thought experiment, how many of the Fortune 500 companies on the list are Silicon Valley tech companies engaged in controversial practices that undermine liberty and privacy or otherwise create social harm? Is it possible that so-called “immigrant-founded companies” are among the worst offenders? One Fortune 500 company AIC counts as “immigrant-founded” is Facebook/Meta, a notable designation considering the conflict and litigation between American-born Mark Zuckerberg and Brazilian-born Eduardo Saverin, who was pushed out of the company long ago. Today, according to CNN, 76 percent of Americans say Facebook makes society worse. That’s a problem for AIC’s demands for more immigration; if Americans wanted fewer Facebook-type companies in society, the answer would be less immigration according to AIC’s logic, it seems.
AIC also counts Google as an immigrant-founded Fortune 500 company, on account of one founder being Michigan-born (Larry Page), and the other being born in the Soviet Union (Sergey Brin). According to a recent Washington Post poll, the United States is divided on whether it trusts Google “to responsibly handle your personal information and data”, with 48 percent saying they trust it, and 47 percent saying they do not trust the company. As to political bias, media researchers find that Google suppresses the websites of Republican candidates, apparently in an effort to promote Democrat candidates. Articles from conservative news outlet Breitbart have been blatantly suppressed by Google, as Breitbart details here. One of the most discussed Google controversies over the last year is its results for the question “can men menstruate”, for which Google provided this as a top answer: “Having a period is not a feminine thing, and people of all genders menstruate, including nonbinary people, agender people, and even plenty of men!”
Potential AIC headline: “Yes, Google might be involved in manipulating our nation’s political system and says that men can menstruate, but did you know it was co-founded by an immigrant?”
But the report’s authors don’t want readers to examine their claims too closely. The advocates of this report generally don’t celebrate or even mention the individual companies because they know that Americans aren’t keen on many of these Fortune 500 companies in the first place.
A similar mass immigration-advocating group, the National Foundation for American Policy, has published its own version of this report, noting that 65 percent of the top artificial intelligence (AI) companies in the United States were founded or co-founded by immigrants. NFAP shared the report exclusively with news outlet Axios. About a month later, Axios reported on a Ipsos survey which asked: “How much do you trust, if at all, the companies developing AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems to do so carefully and with the public’s well-being in mind?” The result: 75 percent of Americans responded “a little/not at all” to the question.
Here's an alternative headline for NFAP: “The overwhelming majority of Americans do not trust the largely immigrant-founded companies developing Artificial Intelligence.”
Boeing is another company that “highlights the benefits we receive from immigrants’ entrepreneurialism” according to AIC. As recently explained by CNN, Boeing has experienced “more than five years of problems with its airplanes, including two fatal crashes of the 737 Max in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people, and most recently a door plug that blew out of the side of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max in January, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the plane”. CNN further explains that the problems “have led to multiple groundings for safety issues and more than $31 billion in cumulative losses” and that Boeing’s CEO “intends to leave the beleaguered company by the end of the year”.
If one were to take these “immigrant founders” claims seriously, then one would have to argue that this disastrous situation is the product of immigrant entrepreneurialism. Is that what the report’s authors believe? One of the co-chairs of the organization that published the original report was Jim McNerney, the former chairman, CEO, and president of Boeing. How does he correlate immigrant entrepreneurship and airplane doors blowing open mid-flight? It would be fascinating to hear him describe this correlation.
Of course, such arguments are just as unserious as the Fortune 500 report, even if they do flow logically from its claims. For the record, Boeing wasn’t actually founded by immigrants, despite claims to the contrary. On page 36 of the original 43-page report, the group notes that Boeing was founded by William E. Boeing and that the country of origin of at least one of his parents was Germany. Mr. Boeing was born in Detroit in 1881. His father was born in Germany and died when William was eight years old. From that we’re supposed to draw some conclusion about immigrant entrepreneurship.
Fortune 500 Companies Founded Solely by Immigrants
While the people behind these claims make a big deal about immigrants founding Fortune 500 companies, no actual effort was made to measure how many of the companies were founded solely by immigrants. This is a conspicuous omission, and one naturally assumes it was due to the fact that very few Fortune 500 companies were founded solely by immigrants. Perhaps the report’s authors will one day provide that metric. In order to assist with that effort, listed below are a handful of Fortune 500 companies that were, in fact, founded solely by immigrants.
Procter & Gamble. The consumer goods company Procter & Gamble was founded in 1837 by William Procter (born in England in 1801) and James Gamble (born in 1803 in Ireland). Procter immigrated to New York in 1830 and started manufacturing candles. He soon moved west with his first wife (who died in Cincinnati in 1832) and married the daughter of a prominent candlemaker in the city.
Gamble’s father brought him and the family to the United States when Gamble was in his teens in 1819. The family stopped in Cincinnati when Gamble became ill, and Gamble apprenticed there as a soap maker. Upon graduating from college in 1824, Gamble started manufacturing soap in 1828.
Procter and Gamble became related by marriage when they married two sisters. They decided to go into business together, both needing pig fat for their products, and established Procter & Gamble.
Kohl’s. The department store chain Kohl’s was founded by Polish Jewish immigrant Maxwell Kohl who opened a grocery store in the Milwaukee area in 1927 and whose “English was so poor that customers often had to make their own change and teach him the names of basic products like Corn Flakes”, according to the original “immigrant founders” report. The grocery store developed into a chain of grocery stores in the Milwaukee area. Years later, in 1962, the company opened its first department store.
Pfizer. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation Pfizer was founded in 1849 as the “Charles Pfizer & Company” by Charles Pfizer and Charles F. Erhart, both born in what is today Germany, in 1824 and 1821, respectively.
eBay. The e-commerce company eBay was founded in 1995 by Parviz Morad Omidyar, who was born in France in 1967 to Iranian parents and immigrated to the United States along with his family when he was a child.
The question remains: What does a company that founded by immigrants 188 years ago (Procter & Gamble) or 30 years ago (eBay) tell us about what immigration policy should be today? Not much.
Conclusion
The United States has benefitted from immigrant entrepreneurship, and the United States has been damaged by the immigration of truly horrible people. Some children of immigrants have gone on to be wonderful American citizens, and some children of immigrants have been horrible additions to American society. People are people, most are average, and some are outliers (for better or for worse).
The authors of the “immigrant founders” claim are suggesting that foreigners are superior and that mass immigration is essential to advance America’s interests. At the same time, their position seems to be that if the United States admits endless amounts of foreign labor, there will be some truly successful immigrants among this population. That may be logically true, simply as a matter of sheer numbers, but it’s not a very interesting argument, nor is it a recipe for a well-calibrated immigration policy. A modern immigration policy would be designed to select for those true geniuses and admit fewer foreigners who are not necessary for a 21st century economy. Obviously, this is a difficult and imprecise policy to achieve.
So what, exactly, is this point of this “immigrant founders” narrative? The truth is that the authors of this claim never intended anyone to spend too much time thinking about it. It’s an emotion-based appeal, developed through convoluted and questionable metrics, designed to promote more immigration at the request of large companies — nothing more. It tells us nothing about the mass illegal immigration the Biden administration has welcomed across the border, nothing about the cheap and exploited labor that Silicon Valley obtains through foreign worker programs, and nothing about the impact this has on American workers. Here’s the message: Immigrants start Fortune 500 companies! If you don’t support mass immigration, you hate the economy! Without open borders, McDonald’s would never have existed (even though it was founded by U.S. citizens born in New Hampshire and Illinois)!
If the report were serious, the authors would have broken it down more clearly: What do the numbers look like when you remove the mergers? How many Fortune 500 companies were founded solely by immigrants? What’s the breakdown of U.S. citizens and immigrants in mixed-founder companies? How should immigration policy be changed so that the United States selects only those likely to be big contributors to the United States? The fact that the authors of these claims don’t do any of this is reason enough for the public not to take the claims seriously.
The United States can and should select for the best of the best. The United States can select immigrants based on their achievements and skill sets. A more focused, thoughtful, targeted approach to legal immigration makes more sense than the American Immigration Council’s proposal, which is nothing more than mass immigration and a hope that some people in the group might achieve success at some point in the future. Immigration policy should make America better by increasing the number of people within our borders who are true geniuses. Admitting people at random in large numbers might have made sense a century and a half ago when the United States was still expanding westward, but the country has changed and our society now has different needs. The mass immigration crowd is living in the past and promoting an outdated agenda.
Topics: Immigration History, Media Coverage of Immigration Policy
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