Immigrant-owned tech firms in the U.S. are more innovative than U.S.-born entrepreneur firms, according to a study based on a new U.S. Census Bureau data.

The National Bureau of Economic Research came to the conclusion after analyzing a new database covering about 11,000 owners of 7,400 high-tech employer businesses based on a random sample of all nonfarm businesses.

“We find uniformly higher rates of innovation in immigrant-owned firms for 15 of 16 different innovation measures; the only exception is for copyright/trademark,” the researchers concluded.

The study comes at a time when President Donald Trump is pushing for a hardline strategy against illegal immigration that has resulted in a 35-day partial government shutdown and a national emergency.

At the same time, however, Trump has also acknowledged the fact that the U.S. wants to encourage talented and highly skilled immigrants to migrate by improving visa policies.

Those skilled immigrants — especially those who are immigrant entrepreneurs — have been thus far responsible for innovation in the high-tech industry, according to the research.

Immigrants were defined in the database, called the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE), as being a noncitizen at birth. The factors the researchers identified to measure innovation included things like work towards patents, the production of publishable findings, and the development of prototypes.

‘Higher propensities to engage in innovation’

The key reason why immigrant-owned companies were better at innovating was because of their “higher propensities to engage in innovation and R&D” compared to locally owned firms, according to the study.

And “while differences are generally insignificant for intellectual property ownership,” their results suggest that “the immigrant advantage is maintained or even increases with firm age” and at every level of the entrepreneur’s education.

Tech giant Alphabet (GOOGL, GOOG) is a prime example of this case. Before he met co-founder Larry Page and built the web search engine that is part of today’s modern lexicon, Google co-founder Sergey Brin immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union.

"I came here to the US at age 6 with my family from the Soviet Union which was at that time the greatest enemy the U.S. had, maybe it still is,” Brin told employees in 2017. “It was a dire period, the cold war, as some people remember it… this country was brave and welcoming and I wouldn’t be where I am today or have any kind of the life that I have today if this was not a brave country that really stood out and spoke for liberty.”