Month: January 2007

From Salon.com.

Twenty-five percent of the technology and engineering companies started in the United States between 1995 and 2005 had at least one key co-founder who was an immigrant, reports a new study from researchers at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. The researchers estimate that these companies generated $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers. Immigrant non-citizens were also responsible for 24 percent of all international patent applications filed from the U.S. in 2006. Indians alone started more engineering and technology companies in the U.S. in the last 10 years than Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese combined.

The lead story on today’s Mail, which I read in the barbers’, expresses the usual spluttering outrage at a campaign by the Revenue to reduce the number of people who underpay their tax. So paying tax is added to obeying speed limits as a law that should be optional for Mail readers.
They support their case with dodgy stats, as you might expect. To illustrate their love of dodgy stats, they also treat the latest ludicrous report from ‘think tank’ Migrationwatch seriously. This report claims that immigrants only contribute 4p each per year to the economy. Given that respectable organisations think the overall contribution of immigrants is about £15bn, that means there are 375bn immigrants in the UK’s population of 65m. Perhaps the paranoid xenophobes do have valid concerns.