Senior fellow Charles Kenny was quoted in a Washington Post article on the effects of immigration on small-businesses.
From the Article
Just about the only thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on nowadays is that small businesses are the key to economic growth and hauling the economy out of recession. Trouble is, as Charles Kenny argues in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence to prop up this view.
While small businesses obviously play an important role in the U.S. economy, the vast majority of them — think restaurants, beauticians, independent retailers, plumbers — will remain small forever, according to a recent survey by two University of Chicago economists. The bulk of them have no plans to grow further. Occasionally there’s a future Apple or Hewlett-Packard among the vast and varied potpourri of small businesses (both firms started out as garage-sized operations), but that’s a relative rarity. Fairly few small businesses are applying for patents, and only a very small slice of them are creating new jobs. “Eighty percent of U.S. small companies that remained in business from 2000 to 2003,” Kenny points out, “didn’t add a single employee.”