Unicorn in the USA: Indians are not stealing American jobs; They are building entire HR departments

TOI correspondent from Washington: For a country currently engaged in an intense debate over whether immigrants are stealing jobs, exploiting opportunities, overwhelming the system, and generally causing the downfall of Western civilization, the United States has produced a rather strange statistic.According to a new policy brief from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), immigrants founded or co-founded 455 of America’s 775 unicorns — the term for a private startup valued at more than $1 billion — representing 59% of all $1 billion startups. While nearly two-thirds of startups in America were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants, nearly 80% have either an immigrant founder or an immigrant in a key leadership role.

Strikingly, at a time of increasing xenophobia directed at Indians by MAGA extremists, the report says people of Indian origin (PIOs) account for $96 billion in startups, more than any other immigrant group. This is far ahead of Israel, which ranked second (60), Britain (47), and China (41). Indians, in terms of startups, are not only at the top of the league table, they are competing on a different playing field, an achievement that is reflected in their median household income now exceeding $150,000 – which means Indian households in the US bring home nearly 80% more than the typical American family ($83,730) – a fact that flies in the face of the MAGA narrative that Indians are low-wage drudges who mock the system.

The timing of the report is remarkable, as it came amid one of the most intense waves of anti-immigrant sentiment in recent American memory, much of it directed at Indians due to the never-ending political battle over H-1B visas. In recent months, and especially since President Trump returned for a second term, Indians in tech have been accused of taking jobs, suppressing wages, monopolizing engineering departments, and, apparently, committing the unforgivable crime of being good at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).While immigration advocates acknowledge many wrinkles in the immigration system and instances of labor market fraud, the NFAP study presents a remarkably positive picture of immigrants’ enterprises and contributions. The report found that unicorn companies founded by immigrants employ an average of 833 workers per company, and that the collective value of the 455 billion-dollar immigrant-founded companies is $5 trillion.

Add to that the startups founded by immigrants that have gone public since 2016, and the number exceeds $5.8 trillion. The NFAP report is viewed as a catalog of recent American innovation. Immigrant-founded startups dominate artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, biotechnology, healthcare, defense technology, and enterprise software. Among the most valuable companies are OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Stripe, and SpaceX. One of the most surprising stories belongs to Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI.

According to NFAP, Shah’s father arrived in the United States with just $16 in his pocket to attend graduate school at Berkeley. Decades later, Shah’s company was valued at $3.5 billion and employed nearly 200 people.Another disadvantageous consequence of NFAP for MAGA concerns international students. Nearly 24% of unicorn companies in the United States have a founder who first came to America as an international student. One example cited in the report is Ashutosh Garg, who arrived from India in 1998, earned his doctorate at the University of Illinois and co-founded both Bloomreach and Eightfold AI, two companies together worth more than $4 billion and employing nearly 1,700 people.

He also holds more than 50 patents and thousands of research citations.While founding a billion-dollar company is in itself a remarkable accomplishment, NFAP has also identified at least 15 immigrants who have founded two or more billion-dollar companies. Six of the fifteen were born in India before immigrating to America: Mohit Arun, Jyoti Bansal, Arvind Jain, Ashutosh Garg, Ajit Singh, and Sachin Nayyar. Others on the list include Noubar Afyan (Lebanon), Al Goldstein (Uzbekistan), Michael Gronager (Denmark), Ignacio Martinez (Spain), Elon Musk (South Africa), Christopher Rhee (France), Ion Stoica (Romania), Ilya Sutskever (Canada), Vlad Tenev (Bulgaria).

Apparently, immigrants don’t just send resumes. They create entire HR departments. For decades, American universities have been the world’s largest magnet for talent. The formula was simple: attract high-achieving students from around the world, educate them, let many of them stay, and then watch them build companies. This model, which by all accounts has served the United States well, is now being challenged by MAGA extremists who believe that immigrants, including foreign students and guest workers, are stealing “American jobs.”

Incidentally, many of the same people who complain about foreign workers invest their money largely through their stock market portfolios and retirement accounts in companies built by immigrants. “The collective value of unicorn companies founded by immigrants rose from $168 billion to $5 trillion between 2016 and 2026, an increase of 2,876% in just one decade. This does not include more than $837 billion in combined market value of unicorn companies with at least one immigrant founder that have gone public since 2016. The rise of these companies and others that will soon go public benefits the pockets of retirees and others.” of Americans, including through individual stock investments and mutual fund holdings,” the NFAP study notes.