January, 2005 (Volume 4, Issue 1)
by Susan C. Pearce, Ph.D.
Executive Summary
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Below is the executive summary for this publication.
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Immigrant women entrepreneurs are rapidly making their mark in the U.S. business sector, in every region of the country and across a large range of industries. Today, immigrant women of the post-1960s wave of immigration comprise one of the fastest growing groups of business owners in the United States. This study examines the rise of immigrant women entrepreneurs and profiles them as a group using data from the 2000 Decennial Census and other sources.
Among the findings in this report:
- In 2000, 8.3 percent of employed immigrant women were business owners, compared to 6.2 percent of employed native-born women.
- The number of immigrant women business owners has increased nearly 190 percent since 1990 and 468 percent since 1980.
- The largest group of immigrant women entrepreneurs in the United States – 234,454 or 41.6 percent of the total – comes from the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean. The second largest group – 165,483 or 29.4 percent of the total – comes from Asia and the Pacific Islands.
- Among the top ten countries from which immigrant women entrepreneurs in the United States originate, three are in Latin America (Mexico, El Salvador, and Cuba), five in Asia and the Pacific Islands (Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, China, and India), and the remaining two are Germany and Canada.
- The top industry for immigrant women business owners is work in private households, followed by child day care centers, and restaurants and other food services. Nineteen of the top twenty industries in which these entrepreneurs work are service industries.
- Two of the top service industries for immigrant women business owners—1) real estate and 2) management, scientific and technical consulting services—are professions where the potential for earnings is much higher than in many other service industries.
- In addition to the 563,814 immigrant women business owners, 1,054 immigrant women across the United States are CEOs of not-for-profit organizations.
- The top ten cities where immigrant women business owners work are distributed across the U.S. Northeast, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest. The most popular destination is the Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County metropolitan area, which hosts 74,134 immigrant women entrepreneurs, or 13 percent of all immigrant women entrepreneurs in the nation.
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