Immigrant, Inc.: Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Driving the New Economy (and how they will save the American worker) [ハードカバー]

The achievements documented in this book are impressive. Immigrants co-founded half the high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and a quarter of the biotech companies in New England. Immigrants are more likely than other Americans to launch companies and to obtain patents. Intel, co-founded by Hungarian immigrant Andrew Grove, employs 90,000 people, while Google, co-founded by Russian immigrant Sergey Brin, employs 20,000. An immigrant from India, Vinod Khosla, co-founded Sun Microsystems. The CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, is Indian-born. News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch is an immigrant from Australia. Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang, an immigrant from Taiwan; Paypal by Elon Musk, an immigrant from South Africa; eBay by Pierre Omidyar, an immigrant from France.

The authors focus on a few lesser-known immigrant success stories and tell them in some detail. There are Te-Ming Chiang, an immigrant from Taiwan, and Ric Fulop, an immigrant from Venezuela, who founded the battery-maker A123, which powers Black & Decker's professional power tools. There is Monte Ahuja, an immigrant from India who started working as a ditch-digger and sleeping on a cot at a Y in Cleveland, then founded Transtar Industries, which he built into the world's largest seller of transmission parts, with 1,800 employees and $500 million in annual revenues.

There is Farouk Shami, who was the most successful hairdresser in Ramallah, in the West Bank, and who after coming to America founded a shampoo, hair dye, and nail polish company with $1 billion a year in revenues. And Quy "Charlie" Ton, an immigrant from Vietnam whose more than 1,000 Regal Nails outlets are America's largest chain of nail salons.

Why the success? To some degree, immigrants are a self-selecting group. "To immigrate is an entrepreneurial act," the authors quote Edward Roberts, founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, as saying.

Expanding immigration and overhauling immigration law seems to lag behind the Obama administration's other priorities, such as "stimulus," health care, financial regulation, and carbon reduction. But the authors make a case that changes to immigration laws could help close the federal deficit by creating more growth and more taxpayers, adding between $66 billion and $100 billion to federal revenues over 10 years. In the end judgments about immigration policy will, or should, turn less on calculations about the federal fisc and more on assessments of America's national character as a refuge and a place where newcomers can innovate and build new lives, as have the contemporary characters whose stories are so compellingly told in this book.

I found this book truly inspirational. "Immigrant, Inc." was well researched and clearly written, giving insight into the personalities and motivations of many of today's immigrants. Thank goodness there are people, such as these authors, who can shed light on the important and constructive aspects of immigration, especially in light of the overwhelming negative discussion that seems to pervade our media. I didn't know what to expect in this book, but I found it a pleasure to read and also an interesting window into the current, hot new ideas driving today's economy.

As one who has heard the stories of my ancestors for years, and traced their journeys from Italy to Ellis Island and beyond, I immediately purchased this book and couldn't have been happier to have done so. It is original, honest, thought-provoking, and in many ways inspirational. I too, am an immigrant, having emigrated to Italy, nearly 20 years ago, so the book fills me with a certain amount of pride. It not only reveals the importance of allowing new blood and new ideas into the lifestream of the U.S., or any country, but Robert Smith's book is a testament to the necessity of a brotherhood among nations.