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Executive Summary
Immigrant business owners make important contributions to the U.S. economy. Although recent research documents these contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs to the U.S. economy less attention has been drawn to the advantages and disadvantages that immigrant entrepreneurs face in creating and maintaining successful businesses. A better understanding of the constraints faced by immigrant entrepreneurs may shed light on whether there is untapped potential for this group and whether their contributions to the U.S. economy can be even greater. One area in which knowledge is especially lacking is access to and use of financial capital among immigrant entrepreneurs. The main reason for the lack of research on access to financial capital among immigrant entrepreneurs is data availability. For the first time in a decade and a half the U.S. Census Bureau collected information on immigrant business owners in the 2007 Survey of Business Owners. Specially commissioned tabulations from these data as well as the most up-to-date data on business ownership patterns from the 2010 Current Population Survey are used to conduct a comprehensive analysis of access to financial capital among businesses owned by immigrants. The key findings from this analysis of immigrant-owned businesses are: 1.
The business ownership rate is higher for immigrants than non-immigrants -- 10.5 percent of the immigrant work force owns a business compared with 9.3 percent of the non-immigrant (i.e. U.S.-born) work force. 2.
Business formation rates are even higher among immigrants than the non-immigrant. The business formation rate per month among immigrants is 0.62 percent (or 620 out of 100,000). This monthly rate of business formation is much higher than the non-immigrant rate of 0.28 percent (or 280 of 100,000). 3.
Immigrant-owned firms have $435,000 in average annual sales and receipts, which is roughly 70 percent of the level of non-immigrant owned firms at $609,000. Examining the full distribution of sales reveals that 11.4 percent of