Immigrants have a long history of starting successful businesses in the U.S.; more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Yet despite this, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about building walls and completely shutting some people out.

Immigrants make up about 13% of the U.S. population–and yet immigrants, or their children, make up a disproportionately large percentage of entrepreneurs in the country.

I’ve always believed that the best entrepreneurs are born and not made. And I’ve spent enough time around them to know.

Even though they wouldn’t describe themselves in these terms, I was raised by two of the bravest, hardest-working entrepreneurs I know. My parents, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, did everything from driving taxis and selling furniture door-to-door to running a makeshift food truck to make a better life for me and my siblings.

And I’m an entrepreneur myself. I sold my first company, an on-demand laundry startup, by the age of 21. Since then I’ve gone on to invest in real estate technology and found Cofound Harlem, a startup accelerator.

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Immigrants make up about 13% of the U.S. population–and yet immigrants, or their children, make up a disproportionately large percentage of entrepreneurs in the country: almost 30% of new entrepreneurs every year.

Being an outsider can give you a perspective that others simply don’t have.

This includes some of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time. Google founder Sergey Brin was born in Russia. eBay was the brainchild of Pierre Omidyar, born in France to Iranian parents. And it’s easy to forget that Steve Jobs’s biological father hailed from Syria.

What is it about the immigrant experience that makes all of the above true, and are there lessons in there that any entrepreneur can learn from? On a recent episode of Open For Business, our eBay-sponsored podcast about building businesses from the ground up, we sought to better understand the nuances of this phenomenon. I spoke with immigrant entrepreneurs who are running high-tech firms and former Wall Street execs who left to start Main Street businesses.