TOI correspondent from Washington: For a country currently engaged in a vigorous debate over whether immigrants are stealing jobs, taking away opportunities, overrunning the system and generally causing the decline of Western civilization, the United States has produced a strange statistic.According to a new policy from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), immigrants have founded or co-founded 455 of America’s 775 unicorns – the term for a private startup company valued at more than $1 billion – accounting for 59% of all US billion dollar start-ups. While about two-thirds of America’s unicorns were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants, about 80% have either an immigrant founder or an immigrant in a key leadership role. Notably, at a time of intense xenophobia directed at Indians by MAGA extremists, the report states that people of Indian origin (PIOs) own $96 billion worth of startups, more than any other immigrant group. This is far ahead of second place Israel (60), Britain (47) and China (41). In terms of startups, Indians are not only leading the league tables, they are batting on a different pitch, an achievement reflected in their median household income that is now above $150,000 – meaning Indian families in the US bring home about 80% more than the typical American family ($83,730) – a fact that runs contrary to the MAGA narrative that Indians are low-paid hard workers breaking out of the system. The timing of the report is excellent, coming amid one of the most intense outbreaks of anti-immigrant sentiment in recent American memory, much of it focused on Indians because of the never-ending political battle over H-1B visas. In recent months, especially since the return of President Trump for a second term, Indians in technology have been accused of taking over jobs, suppressing wages, monopolizing engineering departments and apparently committing the unpardonable crime of being good at science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).While immigration advocates acknowledge that there are indeed many wrinkles in the immigration system and sporadic examples of scams in the job market, the NFAP study presents a remarkably positive picture of immigrant enterprise and contribution. The report found that immigrant-founded unicorns employ an average of 833 employees per company and that 455 immigrant-founded billion-dollar companies are collectively valued at $5 trillion. Add in the immigrant-founded unicorns that have gone public since 2016 and the figure exceeds $5.8 trillion. The NFAP report reads like an inventory of modern American innovation. Immigrant-founded unicorns dominate artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, biotechnology, healthcare, defense technology and enterprise software. Among the most valuable are OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Stripe and SpaceX. One of the most interesting stories comes from Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI. According to NFAP, Shah’s father arrived in the United States with just $16 in his pocket to attend graduate school at Berkeley. Decades later, Shah’s company is valued at $3.5 billion and employs about 200 people.Another disconcerting NFAP finding for MAGA relates to international students. About 24% of American unicorn founders are those who first came to the US as an international student. An example cited in the report is Ashutosh Garg, who immigrated from India in 1998, earned a doctorate at the University of Illinois and went on to co-found both Bloomreach and Eightfold AI, with the two companies having a combined value of more than $4 billion and employing about 1,700 people. He also holds over 50 patents and thousands of research citations.While founding a company worth $1 billion is a remarkable achievement in itself, the NFAP has also identified at least 15 immigrants who have founded companies worth two or more billion dollars. Six of the 15 were born in India before immigrating to the US: Mohit Aaron, Jyoti Bansal, Arvind Jain, Ashutosh Garg, Ajit Singh and Sachin Nayyar. Others on the list include Noubar Affian (born in Lebanon), Al Goldstein (Uzbekistan), Michael Grönager (Denmark), Ignacio Martínez (Spain), Elon Musk (South Africa), Christopher Wray (France), Ion Stoica (Romania), Ilya Sutskever (Canada) and Vlad Tenev (Bulgaria). Of course, immigrants aren’t just sending resumes. They’re building entire human resources departments. For decades, American universities have served as the world’s largest talent magnet. The formula was simple: attract talented students from around the world, educate them, allow many of them to stay, and then watch them build companies. That model, which has served America well in every way, is now being challenged by MAGA radicals who believe that immigrants, including foreign students and guest workers, are stealing “American jobs.” Coincidentally, the same people who complain about foreign workers are many of them deeply invested in companies created by immigrants through their stock market portfolios and retirement accounts. “The collective value of immigrant-founded unicorn companies is set to grow by $168 billion to $5.0 trillion between 2016 and 2026, an increase of 2876% in just a decade. This does not include the more than $837 billion in combined market capitalization for unicorn companies with at least one immigrant founder that have gone public since 2016. These and other publicly traded companies benefits the pocketbooks of retirees and other Americans, including individual stock investments and mutual fund holdings,” the NFAP study notes.