Immigrants Make Best Entrepreneurs

Peter Georgescu for Forbes.com discusses why most immigrants are perfectly suited to become successful entrepreneurs because they recognize how wonderful this country actually is. –

“We are a land of immigrants. This is a truism that has never been more accurate than it is right now. As the New York Times reports: “The foreign-born population in the United States has reached its highest share since 1910, according to government data released in September.”

Why this is great news should be obvious to anyone who read a piece in The Wall Street Journal. It explained in great detail why most immigrants are perfectly suited to become successful entrepreneurs. Before getting into the details, and they are quite interesting, the major takeaway was that immigrants—unlike people born in the U.S.—actually recognize how wonderful this country actually is. That’s refreshing to hear, isn’t it? They marvel at half a dozen factors in American life most of us consider a given of daily life, while the rest of us gripe about what’s wrong with everything around us. They are awe-struck at:

Above all else, the rule of law.

A stable currency and economic system.

Civil liberties and equality under the law.

Organized, free public education, despite the performance flaws in America’s current system.

Our infrastructure of roads and utilities and public services, again despite the need for upgrade and improvement.

All of this is what they behold with wonder after a life history of deprivation, persecution, lack of freedom, economic stagnation, if not open violence from drug cartels or terrorist factions or warring tribes.

And this ability to be delighted with what they have here gives them the best possible outlook and attitude for success: to take nothing for granted and be able to work incredibly hard for the simplest, humblest rewards.

Having come to this country in my youth after years working in a Stalinist labor camp, I know exactly what the study is talking about. It perfectly describes my vision of America, which hasn’t diminished in the nearly six decades since I arrived. What didn’t occur to me, though, were some of the more granular findings of this study.

What’s really intriguing is how it pinpointed the way immigrants, just to survive, need to hone their ability to read other people—to decipher what people around them are thinking and feeling in order to navigate our social fabric while feeling like an outsider. They come more often than not from cultures bartering at the point of sale is universal—there is no fixed price for anything. In other words, they learn to hone sales and persuasion skills as a matter of daily life, simply to survive. From other shores, they bring this acute sensitivity about others and a skill for reaching consensus, and it’s intimately suited for an entrepreneurial struggle.

They also form networks of loyal friends, fellow immigrants who work together to help the newcomers find a way into society. I’m most familiar with this phenomenon in my longtime association with the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans—its immigrant graduates form a lifelong network of mutual assistance and communication, and it creates a matrix for their success.

In 1997, Paul and Daisy Soros created their organization to find people who, like them, had the ability and desire to handle an advanced education, but needed the sort of financial help that wasn’t available to them when they came here. It was a reciprocal proposition: a gift to encourage a lifetime of giving back. The young candidates would have to demonstrate promise that their chosen careers would better their community and country. They also needed to understand and respect the principles and values of freedom and individual rights.

The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship program, with an endowment of more than $80 million, awards to 30 candidates each year—out of more than a thousand who apply—a series of fellowships to cover their tuition and expenses in graduate school. I first became involved with the program nearly two decades ago. I began as an interviewer and have become more involved as time went on. These exceptional young people have no sense of entitlement. Most come from countries still struggling for what we have taken for granted for so long we’re hardly aware of our rare blessings: freedom and opportunity. They are the people who continue to epitomize the classic American dream.

Their attitude and initiative bear out, again and again, what this study found: where we longtime citizens see an economy and society increasingly ossified into rigid economic and political hierarchies, they see nothing but a comparatively easy way to improve their lives in contrast to the strait-jacket of their native societies. They get ahead the way all entrepreneurs do : by shrugging off failure and persisting until they find a way to build themselves a future. They expect society to resist their efforts to break into it, and success to be something rare and wonderful, and thus come at the task of building a life with the resiliency and the stubborn gumption it takes to keep pushing through failure, suffering and setback until success finally arrives. We don’t just need these immigrants. We need to learn from them.”