Last week Becky and I attended the Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards celebration in Cambridge. It is held each year by the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden to honor immigrants for their outstanding achievements in business and community enrichment.
The first honoree this year is Erdem Kaya from Turkey, who started a community-oriented jewelry business in Newburyport. The second is Krenar Komoni from Kosovo. Komoni founded a company that designed a new system for tracking shipping around the world. His innovations produce savings for everyone on the supply chain.
The third honoree is Mariana Matus from Mexico. Based on her research at MIT, she founded and became CEO of BioBot Analytics in Cambridge, which uses wastewater analysis to improve public health. During the COVID-19 epidemic, her company was the first in the world to provide data on COVID-19 levels, based on wastewater monitoring. This information saved countless lives.
Matus’ company continues to monitor for other public health threats, including influenza, RSV, monkey pox and high-risk substances such as opioids.
Listening to awardees’ inspiring stories, we couldn’t help but think of the thousands of immigrants in Massachusetts and how they benefit and enrich our towns and communities. Like the three above, they bring not only economic benefits, but engagement in civic life, mentoring and culture that enriches all our lives.
At the ceremony, we also learned a few “fun facts” about immigrants. For example, that 31 percent of all new businesses in America are started by immigrants. Immigrants also have a higher workforce participation rate than U.S.-born residents, as well as a higher self-employment rate. And, despite what you have heard, immigrants have a lower crime rate than other Americans.
Attending the Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards program, we are left with the realization that immigrants have always made our country better. And that the current hype that immigrants are to blame for our woes, is not only wrong but terribly short-sighted. We need immigrants, not only like Kaya, Komoni and Matus, but the people who grow and pick our food, who feed us in their restaurants, who care for us in hospitals and nursing homes, who build our houses, and bring their stories and art to remind us of our own humanity.
Looking at the big picture, we see a continued need for newcomers to replenish and support us. Recent dips in fertility rates have pushed us below the population-replacement level. A 2024 study by the University of Pennsylvania projects that as we grow older, the U.S. population growth will decline. Also, the worker-to-retiree ratio is expected to drop from 3-1 to 2-1 by 2075. Both factors signal dire outcomes. Preventing these outcomes “will require faster immigration by several multiples of its current rate.”
The simple truth is that we need immigrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, to keep building our societies. We need workers, but we also need imagination and ideas. We need problem solvers, like the honorees named above.
As the descendant of immigrants, I would like to say to my immigrant friends and neighbors, Thank you.
Note: The awards program was sponsored by the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden. It honors Barry Portnoy, the entrepreneur and philanthropist, late husband of the school’s founder, Diane Portnoy.
Ben Jacques Stories 