CNN World
October 3, 2012
Silicon Valley has been a key driver of U.S. growth in the last two decades. Just look at the rise of Apple, Google, and Facebook, and all the jobs and opportunities and new communities they’ve created. But the “secret sauce” behind this success might be running out.
A new book caught my eye this week. It’s called The Immigrant Exodus by Vivek Wadhwa, a former tech entrepreneur who now studies and lectures on immigration. He has some fascinating findings. Wadhwa says between 1995 and 2005, more than a half of all Silicon Valley tech companies were founded by immigrants. But when Wadhwa updated his findings to 2012, he found the proportion of immigrant-founded companies had dropped by a sixth – from 52 percent to 44 percent.
