New Jersey has the nation's second-highest percentage of engineering and technology companies founded by immigrants, according to a study released today on the effect of skilled immigrants on the U.S. economy.Nearly 38 percent of engineering and technology companies in New Jersey have immigrant founders. Only California, with nearly 39 percent, had a higher rate. Among the immigrant-founded startups in New Jersey, Indians were the key founders of 47 percent, the study found.Rajeev Thadani, a former computer programmer and technology consultant who owns a medical billing company in Glen Rock, said that fluency in English may play a key role in the high success rate of Indian entrepreneurs. "The fact that I knew English when I came here gave me a large advantage," Thadani said.Immigrants have become a driving force in technology and engineering nationwide, with a quarter of companies in those fields claiming at least one foreign-born founder, according to the study, which was based on data from 1995 to 2005 and was conducted by researchers at Duke University and the University of California at Berkeley.Indian immigrants play a particularly major role among high-tech entrepreneurs, accounting for 26 percent of all immigrant-founded businesses, according to the study, "America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs." That outpaces the next largest groups of founders, who are from the United Kingdom, China and Taiwan.
Other findings in the study were:
--Immigrant-founded companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005.--Some immigrant groups showed a tendency to start businesses in a particular state. For example, 81 percent of businesses founded by Taiwanese immigrants were in California. Meanwhile, large numbers of Israeli, German and British high-tech entrepreneurs have settled in Massachusetts.
--Immigrant business founders were more heavily concentrated in the semiconductor, computer and software industries than in other engineering and technology fields.
--Silicon Valley continues to attract more foreign-born scientists and engineers than any other region. In 2000, 53 percent of Silicon Valley's science and engineering workforce was foreign-born.