By Richard Herman
During last night’s State of the Union, a Cleveland-area job-creating hero was sitting near the First Lady, listening attentively. His friends call him “Hiro” — short for Hiroyuki Fujita.
Hiro is the founder and chief executive officer of Quality Electrodynamics (QED),. based in Mayfield Heights. The President invited Hiro to sit with Michelle Obama in the first lady’s box as he addressed a joint session of Congress — to share his plans to create jobs in America.
The Obamas couldn’t have chosen a better guest to join them that evening.
The President and Mrs. Obama’s historic nod to Hiro, an immigrant from Japan, is well-deserved for his outstanding achievement in creating innovative technologies and launching companies that create jobs in Northeast Ohio.
Welcoming Hiro to tonight’s State of the Union also serves as “Exhibit A” on why Northeast Ohio (and the nation) should get serious on a focused effort to welcome, attract and support immigrant entrepreneurs.
Hiro illustrates the job-creating power of immigrant entrepreneurship.
According to the Kauffman Foundation, immigrants are twice as likely as native-born to launch a business. When compared to American-born, immigrants are more likely to have an advanced degree, 2X more likely to earn a U.S. patent, and are more likely to have multi-generational relationships in foreign markets where 95% of the world’s consumers live.
Welcoming immigrant entrepreneurs, in partnership with American-born talent, is like dropping seeds into Miracle Grow. American jobs will blossom.
Recent studies by the Partnership for a New American Economy show that 40% of the Fortune 500 companies were launched by an immigrant or child of an immigrant — companies like Apple, GE, U.S. Steel, Dow, Procter & Gamble, Intel, Disney, Google and McDonald’s. Those companies employ 10 million worldwide and have annual revenue of $4.2 trillion.
Many of the New Economy entrepreneurs are immigrants who first find a home in an American univerisity, like Hiro, and later find a job, and then launch their own company. Over 50% of all Ph.D. STEM students in American colleges are foreign-born—- but our immigration laws and local biases often push them away after graduation — increasingly to overseas destinations to compete with America.
This undermines our efforts to create jobs. Another Partnership for a New American Economy/AEI study indicates that for every 100 foreign students that stay in the U.S. after graduating with advanced degrees, 265 jobs are created.
This should be good news for states like Ohio, which ranks #9 in the nation for attracting international students. Ohio has over 20,000 international students, pumping-in over $600,000,000 in Ohio’s economy through tuition and living expenses. But the real pay-off is in retaining them and supporting their entrepreneurial aspirations.
Yet, in Ohio, in part because of state/local policies and negative attitudes towards immigrants, only 14% of our tech companies were founded by someone born abroad. The national rate is 25%; in Silicon Valley — the number is over 50%.
At the federal, state and local levels, it is overdue — let’s put out the welcome mat for immigrant job-creators. At the state and local level, this means investing in programs that meet the special needs of immigrant entrepreneurs; launching an attraction program like Startup Chile; advocating for high skill immigration reform (via Partnership for a New American Economy), and building inclusive and global networks.
Let’s build the most powerful teams on the planet — and win.
Richard Herman, an attorney with the Herman Legal Group LLC based in Cleveland, serves as immigration counsel to global talent and companies, and is the author, with Robert L. Smith, of Immigrant, Inc.; Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Driving the New Economy (and How They Will Save the American Worker).
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