Forty-four percent of Silicon Valley startups have immigrant founders.13 Fifty-one percent of startups worth a billion dollars were founded by immigrants.14 Many more of the most successful American startups have at least one immigrant founder. Openness to immigrants is one of the cultural values that predict future economic growth on a city-by-city basis (one of several data-based indexes that Silicon Valley routinely leads the pack in). As Richard Florida writes in The Flight of the Creative Class, the United States “doesn’t have some intrinsic advantage in the production of creative people,
...more

