The United States has long been an immigrant society as well as an entrepreneurial society. This is no coincidence: immigrants launch new enterprises and invent new technologies at rates much higher than native-born Americans. The conference, an interdisciplinary endeavor, looked at how newcomers have shaped and in turn been shaped by American economic life. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines—history, sociology, anthropology, economics, engineering, Asian American studies, gastronomic sciences, geography, management studies, and others—engaged in lively discussions of topics such as patterns and geographies of ethnic entrepreneurship, barriers to immigrant entrepreneurial success, and policy implications of historical and contemporary research on immigrant entrepreneurship.
