Which U.S. Immigrants End Up Becoming Small-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 those, 16 percent are small-business owners. This tops immigrants from Israel at 13 percent, Syria at 12 percent, and Iran at 12 percent.