Here's an interesting story from Bloomberg about immigrant-owned small businesses:

The study released today found that immigrants own 18 percent of  businesses with fewer than 100 people working for them, while U.S. residents born outside the country account for 13 percent of the nation’s population, based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey.

and

Foreign-born entrepreneurs owned 28 percent of small businesses in the leisure and hospitality fields, the largest percentage of any broad industry. Immigrants constituted a majority of small taxi, dry cleaning and gas station owners. They also made up 43 percent of hotel or motel owners and 37 percent of restaurant operators.

Here are three other interesting stories about immigrants, business and the US economy:

• State-level immigration laws don’t pay off. That’s the consensus from business and agricultural leaders who gathered in Atlanta this week for the first-ever Southeast Summit on Immigration. CEOs, farmers and law enforcement officials from several southern states—fed up with the federal government’s do-nothing immigration policy—pointed repeatedly to the devastating economic toll of immigration laws on local economies.
• Immigrant-owned small businesses bring in an average of $684 million a year to Colorado, according to a newly released study by the Fiscal Policy Institute in New York.
• Overall, there are 900,000 immigrant business owners nationwide, accounting for 18 percent of the 4.9 million small-business owners. In the Twin Cities, immigrants make up 11 percent of all small-business owners.