Yearly Archives: 2012

December 28, 2012. CNBC looks at issues facing small businesses in the New Year, including a reference to FPI's report on immigrant business owners.   And more Americans leaped into entrepreneurship based on their perception of promising opportunities ahead, a group sometimes called opportunity entrepreneurs. In contrast, during the depths of the recession, more people had started businesses because they couldn't find jobs—a trend known as necessity entrepreneurship. Speaking of entrepreneurship, immigrant share of U.S. small-business ownership rose to 18 percent from 12 percent two [...]

December 9, 2012. "All Things Considered" profiles a Baltimore initiative to bring 10,000 new families to the city, making a special point of welcoming immigrants together with native-born Americans. Given the way immigrants are being viewed by government in places like Arizona or Alabama, this may be a way to make Baltimore grow.   "If you think about property taxes for example, having empty buildings is very expensive to a city," Kallick says. "If you have people moving into a neighborhood, they're going to be [...]

November 19, 2012. Karen DeWitt of the Innovation Trail writes about FPI's report: Pulling apart: The continuing impact of income polarization in New York State. "We no longer have a growing middle class with rising living standards," Parrott said. Those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder are stagnating, the report finds. The state’s overall poverty rate is unchanged since 1980, but poverty has been increasing in upstate cities like Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, as people with any wealth have moved to the suburbs. [...]

November 19, 2012. An ABC/Univision report on the economic effects of immigration reform. "I wouldn't get too wedded to any particular or exact number, but I think you can learn a lot from the approach of going ahead and trying to make a projection," said David Dyssegaard Kallick, a senior fellow at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan organization that studies immigration and the economy. "You can see the magnitude of things."

November 15, 2012. A report by WNET (Channel Thirteen) focused on FPI's Pulling Apart report, featuring a chart and write-up of the report. James Parrott, the principal author of the report, said the gap between high and low-income earners also strains the middle class. “Polarization is a major factor behind the erosion in living standards for the middle class–economic growth is no longer as broadly shared as it used to be,” he said. “This result is not inevitable and can and should be addressed.”

November 14, 2012. The San Francisco Chronicle writes about a California nonprofit group that helps low-income immigrants start their own businesses with technical assistance, microfinancing, and networking support. The 12-person staff operates on an annual budget of $1.2 million to $1.4 million and offers classes in San Jose, Richmond and Oakland, as well as Berkeley. Since 2000, clients have improved their household net worth by an average of 9 percent each, Butler said. Immigrants own 18 percent of small businesses nationwide, according to a study this [...]

November 12, 2012. A conservative argument for immigration reform, from The National Review, cites FPI's work. Are the present high American unemployment rates actually being caused by overpopulation? No, jobs are not a resource that exists separately from people. Jobs are created by people. Immigrants are famously entrepreneurial: While immigrants constitute 13 percent of the American population, they own 18 percent of small businesses, and, according to a recent study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, were responsible for 30 percent of the growth of U.S. small [...]

November 12, 2012. GMA, which bills itself as "the go-to site for Filipinos everywhere," ran this profile of Filipina fashion designer Josie Natori, putting her success in context using FPI's report on immigrant business owners. "There is no better place in the world for an immigrant to succeed than in the US. Follow your dream and make it happen," Natori shared her advice to immigrant entrepreneurs in the article. Referring to a June report from the Fiscal Policy Institute's Immigration Research Initiative, Browne noted that more [...]

November 9, 2012. A series of stories in Kiplinger about immigrant entrepreneurs, from a Salvadoran who came as an undocumented immigrant and started a successful concrete supplier to a Jamaican-born bakery owner to the Russian-born co-founder of Google. "Immigrants are such a varied group with people from countries all around the world that have a wide range of skill sets . . . and these [fields] have always been a natural fit" both locally and nationally, says David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of FPI's Immigration Research [...]

November 6, 2012. A CNBC report explains the differences between the two presidential candidates on issues relevant to business owners, citing FPI's study of immigrant business owners. Immigration Obama: Has expressed the need to continue to secure America’s borders and hold businesses accountable that break the law by undermining the American workforce and exploiting undocumented workers. Legislation would allow immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children to apply for work permits. This could increase the number of small business buyers on the market as [...]