🔒Some say immigrant entrepreneurs hold key to CT’s economic revival

In the early days of Reynolds Welding & Fabrication, Jerado Reynolds couldn’t afford to hire any employees to help him at job sites.

“At one time I had to have my wife help me finish a job,” Reynolds said of his life and business partner, Joyce, who co-owns the company with him.

“Of course, if anything [bad] happened I’d blame her,” he chuckled.

That was about 14 years ago, when the two, who had emigrated from Jamaica, were still trying to learn a new regulatory system of permits and paperwork. But today, Reynolds Welding & Fabrication — which produces and installs metals — has grown to 18 employees, and recently bought a Windsor office to replace the small Hartford workspace they rented when they were starting out.

Despite legal immigration slowing in the United States — including a 12 percent decline between fiscal 2017 and 2018 — amid the Trump administration’s hardline stance on the issue, economists, public officials and others in Connecticut say entrepreneurial foreigners like the Reynolds are and will become an increasingly important segment of the state’s economy, which has been haunted by a population aging out of the workforce, or moving out of state during their prime working years.

As of 2017, there were 37,000 foreign-born business owners statewide — 1,000 more than 2014 — including 9,500 in Greater Hartford, according to New American Economy (NAE), a nonpartisan research and immigration advocacy group.

Some 95,000 people across the state are currently employed by immigrant-owned firms, said Andrew Lim, NAE’s research director. About 10 percent of Hartford residents work for a business owned by foreign-born individuals, said Don Chapman, Hartford’s director of small business and community development.

All this points to an obvious solution to a slow-moving state economy, said Pete Gioia, chief economist for PGEcon.com LLC and a consultant for the Connecticut Business & Industry Association. Even so, Gioia said federal and state stakeholders seem to be all but ignoring the potential role immigrant business owners can have in helping with the state’s economic revival.

“This is an economic-development priority for Connecticut that nobody’s paying serious attention to, and you don’t have to give people incentives, you don’t have to pay out government monies or tax breaks,” Gioia said. “Everybody focuses on illegal immigrants, and they don’t focus on people who are legal, who can contribute to our society, and that’s where immigration reform needs to start.”

Connecticut immigrant-owned businesses do have an outsized impact on the economy, recording $15.6 billion in sales in 2017, NAE data show. And immigrants in Greater Hartford are 4.7 percent more likely than their native-born counterparts to go into business for themselves, NAE found.

That’s why Chapman says Hartford is looking to attract and encourage more foreign-born entrepreneurs to set up shop in the city. Efforts include partnering with local nonprofits that provide services for immigrant entrepreneurs like HEDCO and the Spanish American Merchants Association, Chapman said. The city also created a small business micro-loan program that distributes business loans of up to $7,500.

The program, now citywide, started two years ago in Hartford’s Parkville section, a neighborhood with an active foreign-born entrepreneurship scene.

“I think it’s a vital part of our economic-development strategy to make sure that these immigrant communities grow, because they’re dynamic and they’re risk-takers,” Chapman said.

As developers have been renovating buildings in Hartford’s downtown — many of which are filling up with residents after being converted from office space to apartments — smaller, immigrant-owned businesses have been rejuvenating surrounding neighborhoods, Chapman said.

A prime example is in Parkville, an area dotted with clothing and furniture stores and restaurants all owned and run by immigrants.

Many of those businesses are tenants of Carlos Mouta, a landlord who came of age in Parkville after moving there with his family from Mozambique at age 14. Today, he owns about 17 mixed-use properties in Hartford.

“They’re from El Salvador, they’re from Vietnam, they’re from all over the place,” Mouta said. “We have lots of diversity in Parkville, and it’s becoming a cool neighborhood.”

The variety of goods and services coming to the neighborhood from all corners of the world via immigrant entrepreneurs is tracking with Mouta’s ultimate goal of transforming Parkville into Connecticut’s version of Brooklyn, N.Y. he said, referring to the borough’s plethora of global food, entertainment and cultural attractions.

Mouta is currently developing a food market in Hartford’s Parkville neighborhood that will feature international tenants.

Bilonda Diyoka-Saleh, who owns Karibu Clothing and Gift Store on Parkville’s Park Street, runs her business while working as a medical technologist for the UConn John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington. She said data showing immigrants are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans is likely reflective of the culture in their countries of origin. She moved here from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Where I’m from, to do well, people usually do business on the side, even if they have some other job,” Diyoka-Saleh said. “You take risks, you’re not expecting to have much at once, and if it goes slowly, you persevere.”

Barriers to entry

While immigrants are more likely to start a business in Connecticut, it’s not an easy endeavor.

Serious barriers exist including dealing with local and state regulations, said Art Feltman, executive director of International Hartford, a nonprofit that works to stimulate the local economy through immigrant entrepreneurship.

Many foreign nationals looking to start a business in Greater Hartford are experts in their line of work, but have no experience with the kind of government oversight and requirements that exist here, Feltman said.

“In other countries, you don’t need these permits; you have a building, you build a store out from the first floor, and you open for business,” Feltman said. “We’ve had businesses that have actually opened but not had permits, and had been threatened with closure, because people didn’t know that they were supposed to fill out forms.”

There are a number of resources available for local foreign-born business owners, including International Hartford, which, among other services, runs One World Market, an outdoor international food court and entertainment space that features immigrant-owned restaurants each summer.

One of those eateries is Bombay Olive, a West Hartford Indian restaurant run by Hem Raj Gurung, who moved to the United States from Nepal in 1996. Before he opened Bombay Olive in 2008, Gurung spent years working in Indian food restaurants in Boston and Hartford, learning the restaurant industry, including the regulatory environment. He also spent that time saving about $100,000 that he used — along with additional loans he secured from friends — to start up the restaurant.

He credits members of the Greater Hartford business community with supporting and encouraging him in the beginning.

Another entrepreneur who works out of One World Market says the biggest challenges to immigrant-owned businesses are the same as those facing all small companies in Greater Hartford.

Yvette Williams runs 2 Your Health LLC, a holistic health and vegetarian food venture. Williams, who moved to the area from Jamaica with her mother as a child, said over-regulation and laws like the recently-passed $15-per-hour minimum wage are some of the most pronounced hindrances to immigrant as well as native-born business owners.

“Just in general for the state itself, and definitely how it would impact people who are arriving here, it would be great if [the state] had an efficiency task force that really went through and addressed certain aspects of our laws,” Williams said.

Legal immigration

Gioia, the economist, said problems also exist on the federal level with the country’s legal immigration system.

He recalls when he was giving a lecture to a college class a few years back, and noticed a lot of foreign accents. He asked how many people were from another country, about two-thirds of the class’ hands went up. He asked how many would work in the U.S. after graduation, only two hands went up. Students told him they wanted to stay in the country, but couldn’t get visas.

He said Greater Hartford and Connecticut in general simply cannot afford to lose out on young, educated people likely to start businesses, buy property and stimulate the state’s struggling economy.

While the state can’t do anything directly about immigration law, Gioia said, Gov. Ned Lamont can begin making direct public appeals to prospective foreign-born entrepreneurs that Connecticut will welcome them. Additionally, the Northeast congressional delegation must advocate for policies that make it easier for people to move to the U.S. and start a business.

“This is part of immigration reform I think everyone would be on board with,” Gioia said. “This is the sort of stuff that’s going to help the economy.”