TOI reporter in Washington: For a country currently engaged in a heated debate about whether immigrants are stealing jobs, robbing opportunities, overwhelming systems, and generally causing the collapse of Western civilization, the United States has a rather embarrassing statistic.According to a new policy brief from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), immigrants have founded or co-founded 455 of the 775 unicorn companies in the United States (unicorns are private startups worth more than $1 billion), accounting for 59% of all $1 billion startups in the United States. While about two-thirds of U.S. unicorns were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, nearly 80% either have immigrant founders or have immigrants in key leadership roles. Notably, at a time when MAGA extremists are experiencing strong xenophobia against Indians, the report states that startups of Indian origin (PIO) are worth $96 billion, more than any other immigrant group. That’s well ahead of second-placed Israel (60), the United Kingdom (47) and China (41). From a startup perspective, Indians are not only topping the charts but competing in different sectors, an achievement reflected in their median household income now exceeding $150,000, meaning that an Indian household in the United States earns approximately 80% more than a typical American household ($83,730), a fact that goes against MAGA’s narrative that Indians are low-wage drudges making a living off the system. The report’s release is impeccably timed, coinciding with one of the most violent outbursts of anti-immigrant sentiment in recent memory in the United States, much of it directed at Indians amid the never-ending political battle over H-1B visas. In recent months, especially since President Trump’s re-election, Indians in the tech community have been accused of taking away jobs, driving down wages, monopolizing the engineering sector, and apparently committing the unforgivable crime of excelling in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).While immigration advocates acknowledge that there are indeed many problems with the immigration system and some scattered scams in the job market, the NFAP study presents a very positive picture of immigrant enterprise and contributions. The report found that immigrant-founded unicorn companies employ an average of 833 employees each, and 455 immigrant-founded billion-dollar companies have a combined value of $5 trillion. Add in the immigrant-founded unicorns that have gone public since 2016, and the figure exceeds $5.8 trillion. The NFAP report reads like a catalog of modern American innovation. Immigrant-founded unicorns dominate artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, biotech, healthcare, defense technology and enterprise software. The ones with the highest valuations are OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Stripe and SpaceX. One of the more compelling stories belongs to Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI. According to NFAP, Shah’s father arrived in the United States with only $16 in his pocket and was preparing to attend graduate school at Berkeley. Decades later, Shah’s company is valued at $3.5 billion and has nearly 200 employees.Another inconvenient NFAP discovery by MAGA involves international students. Nearly 24% of U.S. unicorn founders came to the United States for the first time as international students. One example cited in the report is Ashutosh Garg, who came to the United States from India in 1998, earned a PhD from the University of Illinois and later co-founded Bloomreach and Evenfold AI, two companies with a combined value of more than $4 billion and approximately 1,700 employees. He also holds more than 50 patents and thousands of research citations.While founding a billion-dollar company is a remarkable achievement in itself, NFAP also found at least 15 immigrants who founded two or more billion-dollar companies. Of the 15, six were born in India before immigrating to the United States: Mohit Aron, Jyoti Bansal, Arvind Jain, Ashutosh Garg, Ajeet Singh and Sachin Nayyar. Others on 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). Clearly, there’s more to immigration than just sending out resumes. They are creating entire HR departments. For decades, American universities have been the world’s greatest talent magnets. The formula is simple: attract top students from around the world, educate them, get many of them to stay, and then watch them build companies. By all accounts, this model has been good for the United States, but is now being challenged by MAGA activists who argue that immigrants, including foreign students and guest workers, are stealing “American jobs.” By the way, many of the people who complain about foreign workers are deeply invested in immigrant-founded companies through stock market portfolios and retirement accounts. “The total value of immigrant-founded unicorn companies rose from $168 billion to $5 trillion between 2016 and 2026, a 2,876% increase in just ten years. This does not include the more than $837 billion in unicorn companies with at least one immigrant founder that have gone public since 2016. The rise of these and other companies about to go public has benefited the wallets of retirees and other Americans, including through individual stock investments and mutual fund holdings,” the NFAP study states.
