As an immigrant, I think it's more that we're more comfortable with taking risks (leaving one's home country and emigrating anywhere is a huge risk, after all), so we don't have a big problem with abandoning steady paychecks and diving (back) into a sea of uncertainty.
Eh, most of your "funded" cash is spent on labor. What does someone working for a funded startup cost? $200K/yr if you skimp on office space?
Figure that as a bootstrapped company, you spend 1/3rd of your time earning money to feed yourself (Without dependents, you can live pretty okay off of 1/3rd of a competent coder's salary, even in SV.) Note, it may be easier, say, if there are three of you to rent out one of you as a contractor full-time and use that money to pay everyone else, rather than all of you working for other people 1/3rd of the time. Getting part-time work that pays good is a significant marketing effort, while $90/hr corp to corp full-time work is easily obtainable through the body shops.
So to compete with a company funded with a half-million bucks, you and your partners need to be willing to put in almost four years of your time.
this is not unreasonable. I've done rather more than that. and there are many advantages; getting contracting work, in my experience, requires a hell of a lot less marketing effort than getting VC money.
Of course, the difficulty increases as your funded competitor gets more funding; if, say, your competition has tens of millions in funding, say, rather than just half a million? yeah, that's going to be rather more difficult.
Funding makes it easier to pay your bills while you work on a problem, but can also remove a lot of the urgency about finding a solution that customers will love. If you depend on customers to pay your bills, however...
There's an interesting correlation between immigrants and entrepreneurship (old-school building a profitable business entrepreneurship, not SV-type scaling an unprofitable business entrepreneurship). My take on this (utterly my own opinion) is that immigrants are less likely to get jobs, so more likely to start their own businesses.
So the people who are going to solve these problems are probably not going to be VC's, Ivy leaguers, incubators, or in Silicon Valley. They're probably going to be bootstrapping (nice bonus: if you're used to living on a very low income then bootstrapping is a lot easier). Maybe the problem here then is not the entrepreneurs, but the media and reporting. We only hear about young entrepreneurs building something awesome with technology. Maybe there's an interesting story about poor, underprivileged people dragging themselves out of poverty with technology?