Migrant entrepreneurship is an important source of economic dynamism in the United States, and the overall scale continues to rise. According to the International Migration Outlook report published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2024, migrant entrepreneurs accounted for 17 per cent of self-employed persons in OECD countries in 2022, up from 11 per cent in 2006, contributing to about 15 per cent employment growth between 2011 and 2021. In the United States, the rate of immigrant entrepreneurship is long higher than that of native-borns, with industry reports in 2024 showing that about 46 per cent of the wealth 500 enterprises are created by immigrants or their children, covering a wide range of fields, including technology, catering, construction and energy, among which Chinese, Indian and Latin American migrants are an important part of the entrepreneurial community.
In recent times, there have been several noteworthy developments in the field of American migrant entrepreneurship, covering the start-up of small businesses, the interface with industry summits, and skills training support. It has been reported that a Dominican immigrant from North Carolina, starting from a zero base, has gradually set up a local construction company, a typical example of where migrants have taken root through small businesses. In California, the Orange County Asian Chamber of Commerce (OCIACC) organized the first successful entrepreneurship summit at the University of California, Owen, bringing together local business leaders and entrepreneurs to provide a platform for migrant entrepreneurs to share their experiences and experiences. An additional $42 million of free AI colleges for American Indian entrepreneurs were launched to provide skills training in artificial intelligence-related skills to immigrant groups and lower the threshold for technology-based entrepreneurship.
Chinese immigrants are an important component of the American entrepreneurial community, whose wealth-accumulation paths and historical heritage have a distinct ethnic identity. The accumulation of wealth by contemporary Chinese immigrants usually follows the three-stage path of “primitive accumulation-value addition-generational transmission”: The initial choice was to start small, low-capital, Māori-high-income businesses, such as laundry, car wash, digital maintenance shops, etc., with a steady cash flow to make the original accumulation; in the medium term, to invest business profits in the real estate market and leverage additional investment through mortgages; and to finalize the transfer of assets to the next generation. According to studies from the 2023 Pew study, 40 per cent of Chinese households with more than $1 million in net assets hold at least three types of assets, which is nearly twice the overall level in the United States; and 35 per cent of Chinese science and technology and finance practitioners leave their businesses before the age of 40, mostly because of the “shoe ceiling” restrictions in the workplace, which currently account for 20 per cent of United States unicorn enterprises in renewable energy. Studies have shown that some Chinese immigrant families can accumulate up to $16 million in net assets through these routes, and their portfolios tend to cover a variety of areas, including business, property and financial investment. A number of Chinese entrepreneurs also rely on transnational family networks for cross-border electricity providers, cross-border supply chains, etc. to expand market boundaries.
The history of Chinese immigrant entrepreneurship dates back to the nineteenth-century California gold rush, with the early Chinese engaged in laundry, agriculture, low-end manufacturing, and some of them completing their original accumulation through small businesses, forming independent community economies in San Francisco, New York, etc. At the beginning of the twentieth century, after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, a Chinese businessman, Look Tin Eli, co-founded the first Chinese-owned bank in the United States, the Bank of Guangdong, to address the financing challenges of Chinese-owned businesses; and led the formation of the first Chinese-owned ship company in 1915, breaking down the transport restrictions imposed by then-Chinese-owned businesses. By the 1970s, the Ming family of Downtown, Boston, had evolved from a street-side restaurant to a global brand of high-end catering, frozen food, and media operations, with frozen food lines covering over 80 per cent of supermarkets across the United States, becoming a landmark case for Chinese restaurant start-ups, and confirming the long-term context in which Chinese immigrants have made industrial breakthroughs through entrepreneurship.
For Chinese planning to start a business in America, compliance is the first prerequisite, with reports that the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted enforcement checks on small businesses run by undocumented immigrants, and that entrepreneurs need to confirm in advance that their immigration status meets business requirements and avoid compliance risks such as undocumented businesses and undocumented workers. At the qualification level, there are different state requirements for operating licences, health permits, trade qualifications for small businesses, such as food licences for catering and wage-fixing for construction, which can be accessed through the United States Small Business Administration (SBA) public information.
At the resource-to-resource level, attention can be given to summits and training activities organized by local Asian Chambers of Commerce and the Chinese Entrepreneurship Association, such as the OCIACC Entrepreneurship Summit, which offers entrepreneurs the opportunity to interact directly with business leaders; where there is a technology-based, scale-up demand for entrepreneurship, special funds can be set up for Chinese entrepreneurship in the Silicon Valley by some of them. In cases involving intergenerational transfer of assets, inheritance planning, tax compliance and avoidance of subsequent property disputes are required in advance.