Simple - descendants of immigrants have momentum, and when they found their startups at home it doesn't mean much beyond there not being some horribly compelling reason to leave. Immigrants founding startups is proof that there is a potential gradient strong enough to uproot them and fly them across the ocean.
>"descendants of immigrants have momentum, and when they found their startups at home it doesn't mean much beyond there not being some horribly compelling reason to leave."
Can you elaborate?
Because that sentence kind of reads like you are saying that entrepreneurship and all of the crazy risk taking involved in it are less meaningful if those entrepreneurs didn't fly across an ocean in order to get to Northern California.
There are startup scenes in countries with lots of problems because people don't like to and can't always leave home. Because migration is a choice between countries, immigration statistics are a "market-y" way to look countries as places to work.
For example, if we had a country with huge numbers of educated people but 40% unemployment, we would expect to see lots of web startups from people trying to find something to do - but this would not mean much for the health of their economy in the immediate term. We could pick up this signal by noticing that lots of people were leaving, indicating that being a founder doesn't have to have a positive expected value in order to be worth trying.
Likewise, a country with a great college to corporate campus pipeline might have an artifically depressed startup scene.
It is not just flying. People need to familiarise themselves with all sorts of new things from shoe size to local law, using zed instead of s in sentences. :) This takes time and energy that could be used for something constructive.
