The Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, 1996-2008
by Robert W. Fairlie, University of California, Santa Cruz.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1395945

The Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, 1996-2008 studied the rate at which people in America start new businesses.  The report, issued in April, 2009, found that the entrepreneurial activity rate increased sharply for immigrants in 2008, further widening the gap between immigrant and native-born rates.  The resulting gap in the entrepreneurial activity rate between immigrants and natives is large.  For immigrants, 530 out of 100,000 people start a business each month compared to 280 out of 100,000 native-born people.

America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs  By Vivek Wadhwa, Duke University, AnnaLee Saxenian, University of California, Berkeley, Ben Rissing, Duke Unversity, and Gary Gereffi, Duke University, 2007.
http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/entrep_immigrants_1_61207.pdf

America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs found that in 25% of engineering and technology companies started in America from 1995 to 2005, at least one key founder was an immigrant.   Nationwide, these immigrant founded tech companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005.  Over 50% of the Silicon Valley startups had one or more immigrants as key founder, compared with the California average of 38.8% or the Ohio average of 14%.   

American Made: The Impact of Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Professionals on U.S. Competitiveness, November, 2006,  by Stuart Anderson and Michaela Platzer for the National Venture Capital Association. http://www.sandhill.com/grafix/content/NVCA.pdf 

American Made found that over the past 15 years, immigrants have started 25 percent of U.S. public companies that were venture-backed.  The current market capitalization of publicly traded immigrant-founded venture-backed companies in the United States exceeds $500 billion. The study found 40 percent of U.S. publicly traded venture-backed companies operating in high-technology manufacturing today were started by immigrants. Moreover, more than half of the employment generated by U.S.  public venture-backed high-tech manufacturers has come from immigrant-founded companies.   Immigrant-founded venture-backed public companies today employ an estimated 220,000 people in the United States and over 400,000 people globally.

Vivek Wadhwa & Global Engineering and Entrepreneurship @ Duke
http://www.soc.duke.edu/GlobalEngineering/

AnnaLee Saxenian at Berkeley
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~anno/

Estimating the Contributions of Immigrant Business Owners to the U.S. Economy by Robert Fairlie, for the Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy, 2008
http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs334tot.pdf

The Economic Impact of International Students in the U.S., by Jason Baumgartner and Lynn Schoch at Indiana University – Bloomington’s  Office of International Services.
http://www.nafsa.org/public_policy.sec/international_education_1/eis_2008/

The economic impact is defined as the amount of money that international students collectively bring into the United States to pay for their education and to support themselves while they (and in some cases, their families) are here.
Research conducted on behalf of NAFSA—Association of International Educators estimates that the annual economic impact which international students bring to the United States to support their education and stay was $15.54 billion for the 2007-2008 acacemic year.

Open Doors:  Report on International Educational Exchange, Institute of International Education, 2008
http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/

The Ethnic Composition of U.S. Inventors, William Kerr, Harvard Business School, 2008
http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-006.pdf

“While foreign-born account for just over 10% of the US working population, they represent 25% of the US science and engineering (SE) workforce and nearly 50% of those with doctorates.”

How much does immigration boost innovation? By Jennifer Hunt  and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle , 2008.
http://ideas.repec.org/p/mcl/mclwop/2008-07.html

The report measures “the extent to which skilled immigrants increase innovation in the United States by exploring individual patenting behavior as well as state-level determinants of patenting. The 2003 National Survey of College Graduates shows that immigrants patent at double the native rate, and that this is entirely accounted for by their disproportionately holding degrees in science and engineering. These data imply that a one percentage point rise in the share of immigrant college graduates in the population increases patents per capita by 6%.”

A World of Opportunity:  Immigrant entrepreneurs have emerged as key engines of
growth for cities  from New York to Los Angeles—and with a little planning and support, they could provide an even bigger economic boost in the future, by Jonathan Bowles and Tara Colton, Center for an Urban Future, 2007
http://www.nycfuture.org/images_pdfs/pdfs/IE-final.pdf