Without Immigrants, the Fortune 500 Would Be the Fortune 284

The study adds to the huge body of literature that shows that immigrants have long powered American science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurial startup companies. Immigrants account for nearly two-thirds of all Nobel Prizes given to U.S.-based research, and make up huge shares of this country’s science and technology workforce. The U.S. would not have anything close to its current science and technology workforce without immigrants. And immigrants have played an outsize role in high-tech startup companies as well as their larger and more established Fortune 500 counterparts, as members of the founding teams of roughly one-third of all venture-backed companies and more than 40 percent of Silicon Valley high-tech startups.

While Trumpists claim that immigrants damage local economies, my own research shows just the opposite: Metros with higher shares of immigrants have higher rates of innovation, higher concentrations of high-tech business, higher incomes and wages, and more knowledge-based economies. The economies of leading metros like the San Francisco Bay Area, Miami, New York, L.A., Houston, Seattle, and D.C. are literally dependent on immigrants who make up large shares of their highly-educated and highly-skilled talent bases. Of course this is nothing new: Immigrants have driven the growth of America’s cities and regions for the past century or more.