Immigrants Are Wired to be the Essential Entrepreneurs — Here's Why That Matters Now More Than Ever
The Psychology of Immigration & Entrepreneurship
In a time of escalating tensions around immigration and refugee crises — from Central and South America to the Middle East to Eastern Europe to Africa — it’s important to remember that those with the grit to leave their homeland, no matter how 'obvious' of a choice it might seem to do so, often possess the invaluable soft skills that we so admire in America’s entrepreneurs.
Consider the story of a bright six-year-old boy named Sergey who found himself leaving his homeland of Russia in 1979. After years of anti-Semitic persecution in the Soviet Union, Sergey’s family made a dicey decision, with no guarantee of a positive outcome: To leave everything they’d ever known to start anew in America.
The calculus involved in such a decision is not simple. While it may seem obvious that those facing persecution should flee, the difficulty is in the details: It takes a heroic risk tolerance and weed-like growth mindset to believe one can replant a new life in bare soil — especially with small children in the shuffle. Often, in these situations, the only thing more unthinkable than staying is leaving.
And yet, Sergey’s family self-selected into the journey of immigration. They weighed the risks and rewards, the obstacles and possibilities, and made the jump. This very fact — that they chose to embark upon a venture that demands the highest degree of determination, courage, adaptability, and opportunism — illuminates volumes about their unique psychology. Without a doubt, they are wired with a greater entrepreneurial spirit than most.
This is the life of Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. A product of both his lived experiences and inborn genetics, Sergey is one of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of all time.
The psychologist John Gartner brilliantly articulates the link between entrepreneurialism and immigration in America in his book, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America (1). He makes the case that individuals who self-select into immigration possess inherent entrepreneurial attributes that, when concentrated in one place, like America, make for a hotbed of innovative activity.
“Immigrants were, by nature, ”capable, energetic, and ambitious” people of “superior character.” That’s why they were immigrants.” —John Gartner PhD quoting Andrew Carnegie
When we consider the necessary social, emotional, and cognitive traits of entrepreneurs, they simply cannot be distinguished from those of self-selecting immigrants:
Risk tolerance
Opportunistic thinking
Growth mindset
Achievement motivation
Adaptability
Responsibility
Networking skills
Agency
Autonomy
While immigrants — especially in a still-Trumpian America — are sometimes typecast as lazy or even criminal advantage-takers, the reality is most often the exact opposite: Immigrants are the ultimate anti-victims. They are not those who, as Carnegie said, “sit helplessly at home, bewailing their hard fate, or, what is still more sad to see, aimlessly contented with it,” but those who take a white-knuckled grip of their lives in an earnest effort to create a better future.
In other words, they are the entrepreneurial spirit, made manifest.
The proof is in America's immigrant-entrepreneur ambrosia: Business ownership is higher among the foreign-born than the native-born in the United States (2), with immigrants’ share of self-employment increasing from 6.9 - 18.4% between 1980 to 2010 (3). With small businesses creating a disproportionate share of new jobs, immigrants can rightfully be considered one of America’s greatest sources of innovation and economic advancement (4).
As I write this from my apartment in the West Village, a glance away from Ellis Island, where my own great, great grandparents disembarked boats from Sicily and Germany, shuffling off the docks with a veritable stew of similarly risk-taking peers and meandering their way across downtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island to start ventures as stonemasons and grow tomatoes in sidewalk cracks, I’m struck with chest-filling awe.
It’s this very mentality, one of hope and survival, that scrapes together the emotional iron needed to build skyscrapers and materialize impossible dreams. I hope that as we look toward our collective future together, a future in which foreign-born US citizens may soon be the rule, not the exception, we can remind ourselves of the tremendous potential born from the immigrants' nature and nurture.
In this tender moment in time, we’d do well to remind ourselves of Carnegie’s words: That the “golden stream” of immigrants into America is more valuable “all the gold mines in the world.”* Not because of what they can do, but because of the character they come to this country with.
Sources:
Gartner, J. D. (2008). The hypomanic edge: the link between (a little) craziness and (a lot of) success in America. Simon and Schuster.
Fairlie, R. W. (2008). Estimating the contribution of immigrant business owners to the US economy. SBA Office of Advocacy.
1980, 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census and 2010 American Community Survey
Reynolds, P., Bosma, N., Autio, E., Hunt, S., De Bono, N., Servais, I., ... & Chin, N. (2005). Global entrepreneurship monitor: Data collection design and implementation 1998–2003. Small business economics, 24, 205-231.
Note: Carnegie, like many people of his time, held views that would now be considered controversial. Inclusion of his views around immigration is not an endorsement of other related or unrelated views.