In his Wall Street Journal column, a paean to immigration, James Freeman repeats a frequently-cited statistic (quoting Guyuanese immigrant Mohamed Ali):
Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Intel founder Andy Grove was a refugee from communist Hungary. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is the son of Abdulfattah Jandali, an immigrant from Syria. Today, the trend continues. A recent study of billion-dollar startups found more than half were founded by immigrants. Our next generation of great companies, too, will depend on immigrants — as will the American economy as a whole.
I think there’s a better statistic. How many Fortune 500 companies or unicorns were started by illegal immigrants? I suspect it’s much, much smaller than 40% and smaller than the percentage of the population they represent.
The discussion of immigration is overly populated by strawmen arguments. Although I’m confident that some of those who oppose immigration to the United States do so for, frankly, racist reasons not all do. Some, like me, think that the present citizenry has a right to pick who is admitted into the country.
That most expansive of documents the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not recognize a right of immigration. Neither to the best of my knowledge does any country in the world. Most countries impose restrictions on immigration and some, like Canada and Australia, impose significantly more stringent restrictions than we do.
The evidence that there is a growing need for workers who don’t have even a high school education and who don’t speak English is meager. If there were such a need, you’d expect the wages for such workers to be growing. They aren’t.
Although the effects of immigration on wages are controversial, most of the studies have found that immigration by workers without high school educations pushes the wages of those who also fit that profile down, as you would expect. Many of those workers are members of the immediately previous cohort of immigrants.
That’s why I support a serious regime of workplace-based enforcement of immigration.
