Our nation is built on the promise of equal opportunity, and that promise resounds around the world to this day. Immigrants seeking economic and social mobility have always been integral to the American success story, but never more so than now. According to 2023 data, nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies were founded by legal immigrants or children of immigrants.
BC Law supports the entrepreneurial community through the Legal Services LAB, where student attorneys in the Community Enterprise and Entrepreneurship & Innovation clinics provide legal services to fledgling businesses, many run by immigrants.
To put entrepreneurial immigrants into context, immigrants make up a large share of the total US population—13.6 percent of Americans reported immigrant status in the 2021 American Community Survey. Women tend to make up a slightly larger segment of the immigrant population at 51.3 percent.
Looked at another way, 61.4 percent of the US-born population is between the ages of 16-64 (the standard working age range), compared to the larger 78 percent of foreign-born residents between the ages 16-64. Because immigrants are much more likely to be working-age, they make up a disproportionately larger segment of the overall labor force, but their total workforce numbers remain smaller, at 28.7 million compared to the US-born labor force of 135.5 million. The accompanying data provide a look at the immigrant entrepreneurship landscape in America today.
To view the infographic, click here.
Sources: American Immigration Council, American Community Survey, US Census 2020.