Another study of foreign born entrepreneurs in the U.S.

“High tech immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States” is a study published this month (July 2009) under the auspices of the Small Business Administration. The study confirms and elaborates on the role of foreign-born workers in high tech startups.
Its executive summary:
In this study, we quantify the role of immigrants in high-tech entrepreneurship in the
United States. We report the results of a survey of a nationally representative sample of rapidly growing high-impact, high-tech companies.1 This group of companies is very important to the U.S. economy, because they account for a disproportionate share of job creation and economic growth. We find that about 16% of the companies in our sample had at least one foreign-born person among their founding teams. This estimate is lower than that found in most previous studies of high-tech immigrant entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, our data show that immigrants play a crucial role in this vital economic activity.
High-impact, high-tech companies founded by immigrant entrepreneurs and those founded by native-born entrepreneurs in our sample are similar in many ways. They operate in the same industries and are about the same size. One important difference between the two is their location. Immigrant-founded companies tend to be located in states that have large immigrant populations.
Another difference is that immigrant-founded companies in our sample are about twice as likely as native-founded companies to state that they have a strategic relationship with a foreign firm, such as a major supplier, key partner, or major customer.
Immigrant-founded companies may also have a higher level of technological
performance than native-founded companies, although the evidence on this issue is not conclusive.
This study sheds light on high-tech immigrant entrepreneurs as individuals as well as on the companies that they helped to found. The vast majority of these individuals are strongly rooted in the United States. A large proportion of them have lived in this country for two decades or more. More than three-quarters of them are U.S. citizens. Two-thirds of them received undergraduate or graduate degrees here. The 250 foreign-born entrepreneurs on whom we have data hail from 54 countries in all regions of the world. India is the largest source country, accounting for 16% of this group, followed by the U.K. at 10%.