One Cost of Cutting Back on Less-Skilled Immigration: Potential Business Creation

To get a sense of how less-skilled immigrants contribute to the economy as business owners—and what a bill like Sen. Cotton’s that discourages them from coming might cost us—we decided to take a look at the most recent data on the entrepreneurship among relatively lower-skilled immigrants. To do this we examined 2015 American Community Survey data on foreign-born entrepreneurs with less than a bachelor’s degree. In 2015, more than 2.1 million such entrepreneurs lived in the United States. This included almost 445,000 entrepreneurs with businesses in construction. More than 100,000 were in either the landscaping or building services industry, a broad category that includes everything from extermination to carpet cleaning businesses. 

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