TOI correspondent from Washington: For a country currently engaged in a vigorous debate about whether immigrants are stealing jobs, swiping opportunities, overwhelming the system, and generally causing western civilization to collapse, the United States has produced a rather awkward statistic.According to a new policy brief by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), immigrants have founded or co-founded 455 of America’s 775 unicorns — the term for a private startup company valued at over $1 billion — accounting for 59% of all US billion dollar start-us. While approximately two-thirds of America’s unicorns were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, nearly 80% have either an immigrant founder or an immigrant in a key leadership role. Remarkably, at a time of intense xenophobia directed at Indians by MAGA extremists, the report says people of Indian-origin (PIOs) account for 96 billion-dollar startups, more than any other immigrant group. This is well ahead of second placed Israel (60), Britain (47), and China (41). Indians, in startup terms, are not merely leading the league table, they are batting on a different pitch, an achievement reflected in their median household income which now tops $ 150,000 – which means Indian families in the US bring home roughly 80% more than the typical American family ($ 83,730) — a fact that runs counter to the MAGA narrative that Indians are low-paid drudges mooching off the system. The timing of the report is exquisite, arriving amid one of the most intense outbreaks of anti-immigrant sentiment in recent American memory, much of it directed at Indians because of the never-ending political battle over H-1B visas. In recent months, particularly since the return of President Trump for a second term, Indians in technology have been accused of taking jobs, suppressing wages, monopolizing engineering departments and, apparently, committing the unforgivable offense of being good at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).While immigration advocates acknowledge there are indeed many wrinkles in the immigration system and stray instances of scams in the job market, the NFAP study presents a remarkably positive picture of immigrant enterprise and contributions. The report found that immigrant-founded unicorns employ an average of 833 workers per company and the collective value of the 455 immigrant-founded billion-dollar companies stands at $5 trillion. Add immigrant-founded unicorns that have gone public since 2016 and the figure exceeds $5.8 trillion. The NFAP report reads like a catalogue of modern American innovation. Immigrant-founded unicorns dominate artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, biotechnology, healthcare, defense technology and enterprise software. Among the highest-valued are OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Stripe and SpaceX. One of the more striking stories belongs to Munjal Shah, the co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI. According to NFAP, Shah’s father arrived in the US with just $16 in his pocket to attend graduate school at Berkeley. Decades later, Shah’s company is valued at $3.5 billion and employs nearly 200 people.Another inconvenient NFAP finding for MAGA concerns international students. Nearly 24% of US unicorns have a founder who first came to America as an international student. One example cited in the report is of Ashutosh Garg, who arrived from India in 1998, earned a doctorate at the University of Illinois and went on to co-found both Bloomreach and Eightfold AI, two companies together valued at more than $4 billion and employing roughly 1,700 people. He also holds more than 50 patents and thousands of research citations.While founding a company valued at $1 billion is in itself a remarkable achievement, NFAP has also identified at least 15 immigrants who have founded two or more billion-dollar companies. Six of the 15 were born in India before immigrating to America: Mohit Aron, Jyoti Bansal, Arvind Jain, Ashutosh Garg , Ajeet Singh, and Sachin Nayyar. Others in the list include Noubar Afeyan (born in Lebanon), Al Goldstein (Uzbekistan), Michael Gronager (Denmark), , Ignacio Martinez (Spain), Elon Musk (South Africa) , Christopher Ré (France), Ion Stoica (Romania), Ilya Sutskever (Canada) and Vlad Tenev (Bulgaria). Apparently, the immigrants are not just sending out resumes. They are creating entire HR departments. For decades, American universities have operated as the world’s greatest talent magnet. The formula was simple: attract brilliant students from around the globe, educate them, allow many of them to stay, and then watch them build companies. That model, which by all accounts has served the US well, is now being challenged by MAGA radicals who believe immigrants, including foreign students and guest workers, are stealing “American jobs.” Incidentally, many of the same people who complain about foreign workers are deeply invested through their stock market portfolios and retirement accounts in companies built by immigrants. “The collective value of immigrant-founded unicorn companies has risen from $168 billion to $5.0 trillion between 2016 and 2026, a 2876% increase in only a decade. That does not include more than $837 billion in combined market capitalization for unicorn companies with at least one immigrant founder that have gone public since 2016. The rise of these and other soon-to-be publicly traded companies benefits the pocketbooks of retirees and other Americans, including through individual stock investments and mutual fund holdings,” the NFAP study notes.
