Immigrant-founded startups are worth $5 trillion. Will Trump’s visa policies threaten the next boom?

Alex Gallego grew up in a small mountain city in Colombia at the height of armed conflict in the 1980s and ’90s.

When he immigrated to Stamford, Conn., in 2001 at age 14 on a green card sponsored by his father, he didn’t speak a word of English.

Today he’s the CEO and founder of a billion-dollar startup, Redpanda Data, one of many immigrant startup founders in the Bay Area.

“Maybe the American dream is this Colombian first-generation immigrant who couldn’t even speak the language and now runs a billion-dollar company,” Gallego said.

A new study by the nonpartisan research organization National Foundation for American Policy showed that 59% of “unicorn” companies — privately held startups with valuations exceeding $1 billion — have an immigrant founder or co-founder.

Of the $1 billion plus startups headquartered in the Bay Area, home to almost half of the nation’s “unicorns,” 69% have an immigrant founder, the study found. The total value of the billion-dollar companies in the U.S. founded by 455 immigrants is $5 trillion. The list includes some of the largest U.S. companies, including SpaceX, founded by South African immigrant Elon Musk; Anthropic, co-founded by Briton Jack Clark; and Stripe, co-founded by Irish-born brothers John and Patrick Collison.

“The research indicates that more open immigration policies will produce more startup companies in America, including cutting-edge companies that transform industries, satisfy consumers and employ many Americans,” said foundation Executive Director Stuart Anderson, who wrote the report. “It shows immigration restrictions could threaten America’s technological leadership and competitiveness.”

The Bay Area’s economic growth has long been powered by immigrants, but President Donald Trump’s stricter immigration policies have made it more difficult for people to legally immigrate to the United States, including through a new $100,000 H-1B visa application fee for companies seeking to employ people abroad.

Backers of Trump’s immigration agenda argue restricting immigration helps American workers, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has called the H-1B visa system a “scam that lets foreign workers fill American jobs.” Tech investor Peter Thiel, himself an immigrant co-founder of unicorn startups, has expressed sympathy for Trump and Vance’s anti-immigration agenda and said that immigration creates “economic skews and distortions,” including raising housing prices. Thiel co-founded Palantir, which has contracted with ICE to use artificial intelligence to aid in tracking down immigrants for deportation. 

Many tech CEOs have pushed back against the federal immigration crackdown, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Musk, who’s defended H-1B visas. Gallego, whose company provides data streaming for some of the world’s largest companies, including the New York Stock Exchange, said these policies are “antithetical to the American dream, the idea that a smart person can change the world.”

The son of a construction worker father and administrative worker mother who still lives in Colombia, Gallego said he initially struggled when he arrived in the U.S. as a teenager. As part of a wave of Colombian migrants fleeing armed conflict, Gallego experienced anti-immigrant sentiment that only worsened after 9/11 occurred just months after he arrived. Frustrated by his inability to communicate, he said he started a reading club to learn English and became functional within 12 months.

The first in his family to go to a four-year university, Gallego said he learned to code when he was forced to buy a computer at New York University.

He was hooked. He started taking advanced programming classes and interned at Forex Capital Markets his sophomore year. Three years after college, he started his first company, which built a framework for data stream processing, and sold it to Akamai, one of the world’s largest cloud computing companies.

“The cool part about being an engineer is you don’t have to ask anyone for permission,” he said. “If you can dream it, you can build it.”

In 2019, he built a new data streaming platform that forms the basis of real-time information exchanges in computer systems. He pitched reinventing the dominant model at the time, a system called Apache Kafka. Companies started using his product, Redpanda.

Gallego moved to San Francisco, eager to be a part of a community that “would take a chance on crazy ideas,” he said. Redpanda Data reached a $1 billion valuation last year and has 200 employees.

Restrictive immigration policies, he said, are a “missed opportunity” to recruit the world’s best minds. His company has sponsored several engineers from abroad, including on the O-1 extraordinary ability visa, and through paying the $100,000 H-1B visa fee for someone. He likes hiring immigrants, he said, who often have a natural “hunger and drive.”

“Immigrants for whom there’s no Plan B will do whatever it takes to win,” he said.

He said he still experiences racism today as a Latino CEO. Recently, when he showed up for a conference, an organizer assumed he was there as part of the cleaning crew. He said he had to tell them, “No, I’m the keynote speaker.”

Iman Abuzeid, whose family is Sudanese, was born in Saudi Arabia, grew up in the United Arab Emirates and London, and immigrated to the U.S. at 24 when her mom won the U.S. “diversity visa” lottery. It awards immigrant visas to people from countries with historically low immigration rates to the United States though the Trump administration has halted this visa. 

The Wharton MBA graduate co-founded a healthcare worker hiring platform called Incredible Health, a San Francisco startup valued at $1.65 billion with about 80 employees.

The idea came to her after family members who are doctors and surgeons complained about understaffing of nurses in operating rooms. Her co-founder and chief technology officer came from a family of nurses, who shared that they sometimes struggled to find jobs. Keen to help address the shortage of healthcare workers, Abuzeid and her co-founder created a two-sided marketplace where more than 1,500 healthcare companies offer jobs to about 1.5 million healthcare workers who use the platform. 

There are parallels between the immigrant experience and founding a company, Abuzeid said.

“Moving to a new country is just as much work and effort as starting a new company,” she said. She argued that tightening immigration pathways have made it “much harder” to immigrate and advised aspiring immigrant entrepreneurs to explore every pathway.

“The United States is, for me, the best country in the world,” she said. “If you’re willing to work hard, have skills and willing to move to the right places, the world is your oyster and we have an entire system here that drives that success.”

Similarly, Kay Zhu, an immigrant from China, said that when he and his co-founders were deciding where to set up their new startup in 2023, they chose the U.S. and the Bay Area for the large capital markets, talent, and importantly, access to cutting-edge AI models created by U.S. companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

His company, Mainfunc, which is behind the AI workspace Genspark, reached unicorn status last year. Headquartered in both Palo Alto and Singapore, it has about 70 employees today.

Zhu said he waited just half a year for his green card when he applied in 2010 through his employer, Google. Today, with large green card backlogs, wait times are much longer.

He started the company with five fellow immigrants, many Google alumni from China, but he’s doubtful a similar group of immigrant entrepreneurs could replicate that success today.

“When I came to the U.S., I didn’t have to think about risk,” he said. “These days, everything has tightened up, tensions are big between China and the U.S., and it is hard for technology and talent to flow between companies and worldwide. Talent didn’t have boundaries back then.”