Insights
The Economic Value of Immigrant Talent
Fifty-nine percent of America’s billion-dollar startups were founded or cofounded by immigrants. That’s 455 companies. Five trillion dollars in value. An average of 833 jobs each. And these are just the people who made it through.
The NFAP published these numbers last month, and the share keeps climbing — up from 55% in 2018. Two-thirds of U.S. unicorns trace back to an immigrant or the child of one.
The value we’ll never see
But the real number isn’t the $5 trillion they created. It’s the value we’ll never see from the ones who didn’t make it past the credential wall, the visa backlog, or the hiring algorithm that couldn’t read their résumé.
The technology to change this
The technology to change this already exists. An AI pilot between Upwardly Global and Workday placed immigrant professionals into hiring pipelines by matching skills instead of credentials. Where manual screening surfaced 45 candidates, the AI found 200 — same roles, same timeframe — by simply looking at what people could do instead of where they studied.
As infrastructure
Now imagine that principle everywhere. Not as charity. As infrastructure. A world where a nurse’s competence crosses a border as easily as capital does. Where your contribution isn’t gated by which country stamped your diploma.
We already know what happens when a few people slip through the cracks in the system. They build trillion-dollar industries. The question isn’t whether immigrant talent is valuable. The question is how much longer we can afford to waste it.