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Reconsidering Immigrant Entrepreneurship —
Number of Employees In addition to income, the CPS also asks respondents how many employees work for their employer at all locations. For self-employed individuals, this question should provide a rough idea of the size of immigrant and native businesses. Table 2 (below) reports the number of employees working in native and immigrant businesses in 1997. The table shows that businesses run by both groups tend to be small, with roughly 87 percent of immigrant and 86 percent of native entrepreneurs having fewer than 10 workers. Overall, the two groups are almost identical in terms of the number of employees. This is also true when we examine the year of entry data located at the bottom of Table 2. The year of entry data also show that immigrant businesses do not seem to grow significantly in size over time. For example, 87 percent of business operated by 1990s immigrants had fewer than 10 employees. In comparison, 86.9 percent of businesses operated by pre-1970 immigrants and 85.7 percent of businesses operated by 1970s immigrants have fewer than 10 employees. It should be pointed out that the CPS is not designed to measure differences in the number of employees working for small business. The lowest value recorded by the survey is nine or fewer employees. However, if businesses operated by immigrants created significantly more jobs than those operated by natives, some differences in the number of employees should still show up in this data. To the extent that there is any difference in the number of employees between immigrant and native businesses, the results in Table 2 very slightly favor native over immigrant businesses. Overall, it seems that, like those of natives, the vast majority of immigrant businesses are small and remain so even when immigrants have been in the country for many years. Like the other measures of entrepreneurship examined so far, what stands out when we compare immigrant and native businesses in terms of employees is the similarities between the two groups, not the differences.
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