The new American dreamers

Their stories are as old as the United States itself: immigrants who arrived on American soil and worked hard to turn opportunities into successes.

• Caroline Mulligan, who left Ireland at age 21 in 1991, now owns a bustling hair salon on Boston's posh Newbury Street.

• Yolanda Zambrano married her Colombian sweetheart, already living in the US, in 1990, and eventually piloted a small travel agency into a award-winning business with $7 million in sales last year.

• Punita Pandey parlayed her engineering degree from India, MBA from the University of California at Berkeley, and a decade of experience in Silicon Valley into her own dotcom start-up in 1999, winning high-tech customers such as Dell, Sony, and IBM.

But these women and others add a twist to the traditional tale. None of them came to the US with a blueprint - or even a vision - to create their own businesses. But today, all of them are successful entrepreneurs. Their stories reflect the confluence of two trends - the vital, expanding roles of both women- and immigrant-owned businesses in the US economy.

For several decades, census data have shown that immigrants are more active as entrepreneurs than native-born Americans. And in the 1990s, many high-skilled newcomers became a driving force in the high-tech centers of the new economy.

"Immigrants are risk-takers," says Steve Moore, an economist with the Club for Growth, who carried out a 1998 study on "the newest Americans" for the National Immigration Forum and the Cato Institute. "I don't think Americans fully appreciate the economic contribution of immigrants, especially when it comes to the businesses they create." His study found a high propensity to start businesses of all kinds, including high-tech giants like Intel and Sun Microsystems, and estimated that those firms pay at least $29 billion annually in taxes.

Women, meanwhile, have come into their own as business owners. Their companies - now about 5.4 million in the US - are growing at more than twice the rate of all businesses, says the Center for Women's Business Research. Their share of venture capital is small, but growing. And immigrant women own businesses at a higher rate than native-born Americans (7.2 percent to 5.6 percent in 1990), according to Robert Fairlie, of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The highest rates were among female immigrants from Korea, Greece, Taiwan, and Iran.

Some follow the more-traditional immigrant path of small-scale service or retail businesses (related story, page 15). Others try their wings among the global elite of high-tech firms. But either way, immigrant women from various continents are writing a new American story.

From the time she was a little girl, Ms. Mulligan had her eyes on the US. "I knew from young, I wanted to come," she says in her Irish lilt, "and I knew that if I didn't do it early on, I never would."

So as soon as she finished a four-year apprenticeship for hairdressing in 1990, this oldest child in a farm family of six daughters applied for a visa. Within a year she was in the US, and five months later she had a permit to work as a hairdresser.

Then the tough part began. Without her own clientele, no salon in Boston was interested in hiring her, except to do the same work she had done for years at home as an apprentice.

After two low-paying jobs, she finally found a spot at a salon that advertised regularly, attracting new clients. She worked for seven years alongside another conscientious young stylist, Cheri O'Donnell, who is third-generation Irish in America. Then they hatched their dream to open a salon on Newbury Street, the city's most prestigious and competitive location.

A small, slender woman who looks younger than her years, Mulligan exudes an easy confidence. "If you're not confident, a client is not confident," she says matter-of-factly.

In December 1999, the young women went off to the Small Business Administration (SBA) for advice, where they got help from retired professionals, accountants, insurance people, banks, and lawyers. "Once you do your business plan, they go over it with you; they told us we had what it took to be successful," she adds with a broad smile.

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