At 1871, it is part of our core values to provide resources and support to every single subset of our diverse community and to level the playing field for entrepreneurs so they have every ability to build their businesses successfully. Today, we are announcing a new benefit for our members that will allow themselves and their employees to deal with immigration-related issues efficiently and effectively.
Through a partnership with Road to Status -- an online platform that provides digital tools and step-by-step guidance for immigrants seeking status -- 1871 members, alumni and their families will have free access to a platform that will guide and support them as they deal with a number of immigration issues and questions. The 1871 community will receive a discount automatically at checkout on applications such as DACA, U.S. Citizenship, Green Card, and much more. The software is free to try, and users only pay for the applications that are completed and printed. The service offers step-by-step self-guided instructions for a variety of status applications and processes, and also offers review of the documents by a licensed immigration attorney. Road to Status was founded in Chicago in 2015 by Javad Khazaeli and John Bauschard.
This new benefit is crucial to supporting the rich network of immigrant entrepreneurs in our community, and you can learn more about the platform here.
Why is this so important to the entrepreneurship community? Consider this:
- Fully 1/3 of all venture-backed companies that went public between 2006 and 2012 had at least one immigrant founder at the helm. And those are just the ones that went public.
- Immigrants today are more than twice as likely to found businesses as their native-born counterparts and are responsible for more than 25-percent of all new business creation and related job growth.
- The U.S. immigrant population stood at more than 42.4 million, or 13.3 percent, of the total U.S. population of 318.9 million in 2014, according to ACS data. That is nearly 1 in 6 Americans.
- Immigrants in the United States and their U.S.-born children now number approximately 81 million people, or 26 percent of the overall U.S. population. That was in 2014.
- The path to U.S. Citizenship can be as long as 12-15+ years requiring 5-10+ separate occasions where the processing and filing of expensive and increasingly complicated immigration paperwork is required.
1871 is excited about the new partnership with Road to Status, and we hope our members find it a valuable tool for themselves and their families. 1871 members also have access to other benefits and perks of their membership, including free access to DocuSign, student loan repayment benefits through Peanut Butter and access to a healthcare exchange. To learn more about the benefits available to 1871 members, click here.
