Yearly Archives: 2014

October 15, 2014. A story in Vox stresses the role of immigrant entrepreneurship, citing FPI's work on the subject. Economic research shows repeatedly that, overall, immigrants don't displace U.S.-born workers. How can this be? One part of the answer is that immigrants are not just workers, they are also entrepreneurs, so they create jobs for themselves and also for others. (Another part of the story, which is not covered in this piece, is that immigrants also expand consumer demand, so at the same time as more [...]

September 22, 2014. This opinion piece by Galen Spencer Hull celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month by focusing on immigrant and minority businesses. Tennessee has one of the fastest-growing immigrant communities in the U.S., earning Nashville the sobriquet as an “Ellis Island.” Immigrants are making notable contributions to the region’s economic development. Music City has become a hub, attracting a steady stream of immigrants. Davidson County alone has an immigrant population of about 40,000, or 7 percent of the total, followed by Williamson County (4 percent) and [...]

September 18, 2014. The Baltimore Sun ran a long editorial about the city's efforts to attract 10,000 new families to the city, with a particular focus on immigrants, including this reference to FPI's work: ...a 2012 report from the Fiscal Policy Institute's Immigration Research Initiative found that immigrants made up 9 percent of Baltimore's population but 12 percent of the workforce and a remarkable 21 percent of business owners.

August 27, 2014. The National Journal looked at immigrant small business owners, highlighting an aspect of the Fiscal Policy Institute's 2012 report that few others have focused on: which immigrant groups are the most entrepreneurial? Greek immigrants, in fact, have the highest percentage of people in the labor force who are small business owners. According to a report from the Fiscal Policy Institute's Immigration Research Initiative, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 75,000 Greek immigrants in the U.S. labor force. And of [...]

July 19, 2014. A New York Times story about Miami's economic growth is grounded in data from the Fiscal Policy Institute about immigrant business owners. Of immigrants in the Miami metro area, the article says: Their relative wealth has allowed them to ramp up businesses like import-export companies and banks, and to open restaurants that dish out arepas from Venezuela, coxinhas from Brazil and alfajores from Argentina. Partly as a result of that influx, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale region eclipsed Los Angeles in 2012 as the [...]

July 2, 2014. A Los Angeles Times article about a report by our colleagues at the Iowa Policy Project talks about the economic and tax contribution of immigrants to the state of Iowa. The Iowa report was developed with data that the Fiscal Policy Institute developed with the Economic Policy Institute, and the article also mentions the FPI report directly: About 120,000 immigrants live in Iowa, and nearly 75,000 are in the U.S. illegally, Fisher said. With Iowa's median age trending upward, immigrants help bolster Iowa's [...]