Immigrants save US tech industry

WHILE THE US worries about floods of foreigners coming in and nicking their jobs, the Washington Post points out that immigration has been creating jobs in the tech industry.

Apparently immigrants are a driving force behind IT start-ups with a quarter of them in the last decade being launched by foreign-born founders.

According to a study, based on telephone surveys with 2,054 companies, immigrants, mostly from India and China, have started hundreds of companies with estimated sales of nearly $50 billion.

About 25 per cent of international patents filed in the United States in 2006 were filed by immigrants.

Scott McNealy, chairman and co-founder of Sun Microsystems,is quoted as saying that immigrants Vinod Kosla of India and Andy Bechtelsheim of Germany helped him set up Sun.

So far Sun has "created tens of thousands of jobs that have generated billions of dollars in exports and has created thousands of patents and intellectual-property positions," McNealy said.

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