Success Story with a Twist
An increasing number of immigrant women are entrepreneurs, according to a study by a Towson University professor for the Immigration Policy Center.

Published June 14, 2005

By Kelly Brewington, Sun Staff

[We are providing an excerpt of the story originally published in The Baltimore Sun on June 14, 2005.]

... Popular culture paints an image of the immigrant entrepreneur as a male breadwinner, an industrious owner of a storefront business in an ethnic neighborhood who cares for his wife and family, says Susan Pearce, a sociology professor at Towson University who conducted the study. While historically the numbers supported that depiction, Pearce's research shows today the percentage of immigrant male business owners has diminished while the ranks of immigrant female entrepreneurs has jumped.

Nearly 20,000 immigrant women business owners live in the Baltimore-Washington region, the fourth-most popular region in the nation, according to the study, based on U.S. census data and interviews with 20 women in the area. ...

Pearce's research also highlights a little-known reality: Immigrants become entrepreneurs at higher rates than native-born Americans, according to the census. In 2000, 8.3 percent of employed immigrant women were business owners, compared with 6.2 percent of native-born women. ...

Once Sheela Murthy launched an Owings Mills immigration law firm, she began reaching out to other women. Of a staff of 50, about 90 percent are women.

Murthy left southern India for Harvard Law School in 1987. After earning a master's degree, she planned to work at a major firm in New York, earn enough to pay off loans and return home.

But she remained, working in New York and later Baltimore, where associates frequently asked for her help researching immigration cases.

Murthy knew the process all too well, having spent her first 12 years in the United States navigating the labyrinth of immigration paperwork from student visa to citizenship.

She had to wait for a "green card," or permanent residency, before she could start her firm.

"People think it's so easy; all these people jump into the fray and stay in this country," she says. "No way. It's tons of money, tons of time, tons of months and years of sleepless nights not knowing if your approval for a visa or a green card will go through."

Though the beginning was tough, Murthy says she thinks the success she has achieved would be unattainable in India. The fast-talking lawyer doesn't mince words when she criticizes women's roles in her home country.

"No woman in her right mind would want to go back," she says. "The notion there, and so much of the world really, is that women are created on this earth to serve the man."

Murthy believes that people who complain about a lack of opportunity in the United States don't know how good they have it.

"This is the only country that if you work hard, you do well," says Murthy. "If you sit around, you get nothing."