Made In America; Watch out, Bill Gates. Women who immigrate to the West are finding success in their new homelands by starting their own businesses.(Cover Story)

Byline: Sarah Childress (With Silvia Spring in London)

Sheela Murthy, who moved to the United States from India in 1986, had worked only a few years at a New York law firm when she glimpsed her own glass ceiling. "It just felt like, 'Why am I here at 2 in the morning, photocopying documents?' " she says. Murthy remembers thinking of the American Dream, "If this is really real, why don't I pluck some of the golden fruit?" After trying another firm in Baltimore, she started her own, specializing in immigration law. For a month she sat at home, making cold calls. Eleven years later, her firm had swelled to 11 lawyers. Now Murthy's found her dream job--and is making more money than she ever had at the copy machine.

Immigrant women are steadily carving out space for themselves in the world's biggest economies. In the past decade, the number of immigrant women business owners in the United States exploded by nearly 200 percent, according to a study by the Immigration Policy Center in Washington, D.C. The percentage of self-employed immigrant women is higher than the corresponding number of self-employed native-born women, and they're even closing the gap with immigrant men. Their entrepreneurialism is partly pragmatic: by working on their own terms, immigrant women can earn extra money without struggling in a hostile workplace or worrying about child care. But it's also a sign of a changing world. More female immigrants have better education and skills than before, and it is increasingly acceptable for them to work outside the home.

Most of their businesses are small start-ups in which women sell products they learned to make in their native countries. That's how Ofelia Nieto, 39, a Colombian refugee who arrived in the United States with her family two years ago, became an entrepreneur. She started selling handmade necklaces to her California neighbors to help pay the bills. Now she hawks her wares at local fairs, hotels and boutiques--and is working on expanding online. Others manage day-care services, or run restaurants and beauty salons. And increasingly, women are expanding into other industries, like real estate, tech consulting and even construction.

What drives a newcomer to an unfamiliar land to start her own ...