Reuters reporter John Buchanan covers an issue that's not gotten wide coverage in the U.S. press. It's about a particular kind of illegal immigrant. From his story, which ran in the Washington Post, "Rich illegal immigrants hide in the shadows":
Many illegal immigrants in the United States are manual laborers on low wages. But there's another group that attracts much less attention: entrepreneurs who have set up businesses, created jobs and grown affluent.
There are up to 20,000 illegal immigrants earning upward of $100,000 a year as entrepreneurs, and their existence challenges the stereotype that illegal immigrants are a drain on the U.S. economy, according to immigration lawyers and academics.
Many say they are living the "American Dream," but almost none trumpet their achievements because they fear deportation.
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It is not easy to determine the number of illegal immigrants who earn six figure salaries, but there could be 20,000 of them and a significant proportion earn up to $300,000 a year, said Jeff Passel, lead demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.
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"These people should be treated like heroes not criminals," said Felipe Korzenny, professor of marketing and communications at Florida State University. Wealthy illegal immigrants also came from India, China, Taiwan, Israel and South Africa, he said.
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More than half of Silicon Valley start-ups between 1995 and 2005 had one or more immigrants as key founders, according to a study by the University of California at Berkeley and Vivek Wadhwa, founder of Relativity Technologies.
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"You have to figure out what to do with the 12 million illegal immigrants that are unskilled," said Wadhwa, who was born in India. "But what about the few hundred thousand that help us boost our competitiveness?"
More on Wadhwa's research here.
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