AURORA | Ever since he immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia a little more than a decade ago, Girma Baye had his eye on owning his own business.
So for a few years, Baye, now 31, saved what he could from delivery and warehouse jobs so he and his family could open Cozy Cafe at East Fourth Avenue and Havana Street.
Baye said running his own restaurant and bar has always been a dream, and now he gets to live it.
“It gives you freedom for your life, freedom of your financial status,” Baye said. “It’s just one of those things, everybody wants to live his own dream.”
Recent studies say that in Colorado and around the country, immigrants like Baye are more likely to launch their own businesses than native-born people. And, while entrepreneurship rates have remained generally flat over the last decade and a half for native-born people, rates among immigrants have climbed.
According to the Kaufman Foundation, a Kansas City-based nonprofit that studies entrepreneurship, immigrants are more than twice as likely as native-born citizens to start businesses. In 2012, the most recent year statistics were available, 490 out of 100,000 immigrants started their own businesses each month. Among native-born people, just 260 out of 100,000 started a business each month. And, according to the Kaufman study, immigrants now make up about a fourth of all entrepreneurs, up from about 13 percent in 1996.
In Aurora, immigrants from around the world are driving a booming ethnic dining scene, particularly along Havana Street.
Gayle Jetchick, executive director of the Havana Business Improvement District, said she isn’t surprised to hear that immigrants are more likely to start businesses than native-born people. She sees that play out everyday along
Havana.
“I think they are just pursuing the am dream,” she said.
Jetchick said it’s particularly impressive to see people who are new to the country and still learning English navigate the regulations that come with opening a business.
“It’s not easy to start a is so you have to give it to them,” she said.
According to the Immigration Policy Center, a nonprofit that studies immigration, about 10 percent of business owners in Colorado are foreign born. In 2010, new immigrant business owners had total net business income of $1.2 billion, which is 7.3 percent of all net business income in the state, according to IPC.
The group also said some of the state’s most-successful companies — including Coors Brewery, Qwest Communications, CH2M Hill, and Ball Corp. — have at least one founder who is either an immigrant or the child of an immigrant.
At the city of Aurora’s Small Business Development Center, small business specialist Chuck Hahn said it’s common to see immigrants looking to launch their own business.
While the city doesn’t track how many foreign-born entrepreneurs use the business development center’s services, Hahn said more than half of the clients are minorities, and a sizable number of those are immigrants.
Hahn said there are some challenges unique to immigrants. For one, many are used to conducting business primarily with cash, a practice that can make it hard to get credit.
“In our country you have to have some debt and pay it off, and that always sounds sort of weird for them,” he said.
Hahn said many immigrants are also surprised to learn that the city offers translation services in dozens of languages to help them navigate getting all the appropriate licenses.
Back at the Cozy Cafe, Baye said running a business means a lot of work, generally seven days a week, but he doesn’t mind.
“This is a place that you can work hard and you can make what you want,” he said. “But it takes a lot, America doesn’t give you anything free.”
Open Borders.
Let more immigrants in.