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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

It's more subtle than that. Let's say you get 100 risk points to spend. An American might say, I'll spend 75 points on setting up my own business. An immigrant would say, I've already spent 50 risk points on coming to America, I don't have 75 to spare.

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Non-American can not legally start a business without a green card or getting a work visa for his startup (extremely hard to get)

Yeah - but you are saying that immigrants are risk-averse and that's simply not true - just they have allocated their risk differently than you.

I agree. I think that immigration itself is a risky undertaking. One has to abandon everything familiar, which is by no means easy, regardless the difficult circumstances. Besides, all the rich kids in the US today we are discussing and capitalists are the descendants of immigrants. I would not say that immigrants are risk-averse, but I think that obtaining a visa or green card mainly keep them from entrepreneurial ventures. Or maybe language barriers.

Actually my experience growing up in NYC (and this may be an outlier, but I see it elsewhere) is that immigrants are more likely to be entrepreneurial because traditional employment is off limits due to language, cultural, and educational barriers–and sometimes outright discrimination. That's why there are New York archetypes of Korean green grocers, Chinese dry cleaners, Greek diner owners, etc (albeit these are rapidly shifting). The large number of Jewish-owned businesses in NY speaks to the historical discrimination against Jews (and not just some stereotypical belief about business acumen). Not exactly social networking and cloud computing, but entrepreneurship nonetheless.

Is this so? I was under impression that you can easily start a business in US without residence, you just cannot work for it in US.

So could one start a company in US and do international work (teh interwebz) with possible US hires to take care of local business?

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