U.S. High-Skilled Immigration, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship: Empirical Approaches and Evidence

Abstract

High-skilled immigrants are a very important component of U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship. Immigrants account for roughly a quarter of U.S. workers in these fields, and they have a similar contribution in terms of output measures like patents or firm starts. This contribution has been rapidly growing over the last three decades. In terms of quality, the average skilled immigrant appears to be better trained to work in these fields, but conditional on educational attainment of comparable quality to natives. The exception to this is that immigrants have a disproportionate impact among the very highest achievers (e.g., Nobel Prize winners). Studies regarding the impact of immigrants on natives tend to find limited consequences in the short-run, while the results in the long-run are more varied and much less certain. Immigrants in the United States aid business and technology exchanges with their home countries, but the overall effect that the migration has on the home country remains unclear. We know very little about return migration of workers engaged in innovation and entrepreneurship, except that it is rapidly growing in importance.

The wider economic impacts of high-skilled migrants: a survey of the literature for receiving countries

“…As Kerr (2013) notes, there are substantial knowledge gaps even in the US, the best-covered country in this review. The research base is very sparse for other countries; this matters because sector, country and area-specific differences appear to be highly important in shaping skilled migrants' economic impacts.…”

“…Results vary widely, probably in part because of time and field choices (Kerr 2013). Borjas and Doran (2012a) examine how the arrival of mathematicians from the former Soviet Union affected the publications and career trajectories of their US counterparts, finding little evidence of aggregate increases in knowledge but strong evidence of native crowding out, both in terms of subject shifts and exits from the field 6 .…”

“…In recent years, the economics of migration field has seen a rapid rise in studies exploring what we might call 'the wider effects of migration' -and the role of high-skilled migrants in these processes (Chiswick 2005;Huber et al 2010b;Kerr and Kerr 2011;George et al 2012;Hanson 2012;Lewis 2012;Nathan 2012a;Kerr 2013).…”

Social Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship

“…The greater tendency to entrepreneurship among immigrants evident in Table 1a has been previously observed and discussed by Fairlee (2008), Hunt (2011), and . Kerr (2013) and Fairlie and Lofstrom (2013) provide reviews. ment.…”

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

“…Evidence from more historical contexts are mixed (e.g., Borjas and Doran, 2012;Moser et al, 2014). Kerr (2013) provides an extended review of literature on skilled immigration and notes the particular gap around the empirics of immigrant entrepreneurship speci…cally.…”