Travel ban threatens Main Street small businesses
Ban is likely to make U.S. businesspeople less welcome abroad
Walk down University Avenue in Palo Alto, the “Main Street” of Silicon Valley, and you’ll easily hear seven or 10 different languages spoken.
Those speakers come from all over the world to launch companies, create jobs, invest in America. America has always attracted the best and the brightest, the most eager, from around the world. But President Trump’s recent travel ban threatens to silence those voices, divert those eager immigrants, reduce their economic impact. And that’s bad news for entrepreneurs and small businesses, whether in Silicon Valley or Sioux Falls.
Why would a travel ban, limited to seven countries, threaten your small business? How could it stifle your entrepreneurial aspirations?
Because Trump’s travel ban is likely to reduce immigration, inhibit foreign visitors and make American businesspeople less welcome abroad, all damaging the overall U.S. economy.
“I’m here because I’m a refugee,” Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was reported to have said when he was seen joining travel ban protesters at San Francisco International Airport on Jan. 28.
Yes, Google, along with more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies, was founded by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. Those companies employ more than 3.6 million Americans. In 2010, immigrant business owners were responsible for 15% of all business revenue in the U.S., or $121.2 billion.
Those companies and their employees have spawned a lot of new small businesses. Google itself employs more than 60,000 people, who in turn use the services of many small businesses. Google is almost certainly the No. 1 advertising medium for small businesses. In your town or city, there are probably dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of people who owe their business or job, directly or indirectly, to Google.
That’s just one company founded by an immigrant. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ biological father was a Syrian refugee. Imagine how much economic impact Apple and Pixar have had on America. Immigrants have had a similar impact in virtually every industry.
Immigrants are driving new job creation in the U.S. Immigrants start businesses at almost double the rate of non-immigrants, according to a 2012 Kauffman Foundation study.
All over America, people owe their jobs or their businesses to immigrants. It’s likely that many of your customers and vendors are immigrants. As immigrants feel unwelcome and afraid, they stop coming, stop starting or stop funding businesses. And they stop spending.
It’s important to understand how this travel ban is viewed, even by immigrants living and working legally in the United States for decades.
Fear and uncertainty is a reasonable response. Trump’s executive order was enacted quickly, without review by the Homeland Security Department. The selection of the seven countries appears arbitrary: No acts of U.S. domestic terrorism arose from nationals of those countries. It applies to those with legal, permanent resident status as well as students and visitors.
Such a unilateral and unreasonable travel ban inhibits visitors to the United States, with almost certain negative effects on the hospitality industry, an industry dominated by small businesses. Hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants, tour guides: All suffer as tourism diminishes. And the CEO of one of the leading hospitality companies, Expedia, is himself an Iranian refugee who could be caught up in Trump’s travel ban.
Trump’s impulsive, chaotic, manner is also unsettling to businesspeople.
The thing everyone in business wants from politicians is neither right nor left, Republican nor Democrat. What they want, more than anything, is certainty. An impulsive, thoughtless president is more than worrisome.
Through this travel ban, Trump is doing serious damage toward the goodwill Americans have enjoyed when doing business and traveling abroad. We are, almost overnight, seen as unreliable, capricious, narrowminded. Small-business owners in particular understand that goodwill is critical to being able to do good business.
That’s why business leaders — on the right and the left, Democrat and Republican — have spoken out against Trump’s travel ban. It’s not surprising that in response to Trump’s travel ban and behavior, the stock market dropped.
Perhaps most importantly, Trump’s travel ban undermines the American values that help hold us together as a nation. We are a nation of immigrants that welcomes and celebrates immigrants.
“On every level: moral, humanitarian, economic, logical,” tweeted Aaron Levie, CEO of document-sharing company Box, “this ban is wrong and is completely antithetical to the principles of America.”