How 12 Immigrant Entrepreneurs Have Made America Great

Witnessing the immigration debate unfold in America over the past several years has, for me, been the conversation that sparked my response.

Perhaps it’s because I worked for startups led by international founders whose choice to start businesses in America created jobs for people in office buildings that, somewhat poetically, had views of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

Perhaps it’s because my family’s history includes surviving the Soviet Union and moving to America when I was just 5 years old.

Regardless of my own experience or take on the matter, immigration remains a focal point of American politics and culture with increasing importance. It’s vital that we discuss what immigrants bring to their country of choice: sizable contributions to business, technology, and entrepreneurship.

In the United States, the narrative of immigrants becoming successful entrepreneurs may sound like a well-worn fable of the American Dream.

Some may call it “fake news”.

However, statistics enforce the fact that immigrants are vital to the American economy.

As an immigrant myself from Ukraine, I have gained a perspective about immigration that others may not have had the opportunity to develop.

To provide greater context about what immigration sparks, consider these twelve immigrants who embraced the opportunity and brought something great to America:

When Ulukaya discovered a Kraft yogurt factory in Upstate New York in the midst of closing, he purchased what would become Chobani’s first production facility. Bringing the Greek yogurt he’d grown up with to American supermarkets paid off, allowing Ulukaya to reemploy many of the former Kraft employees.

When Phil Libin immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union, his family settled in a rough Bronx neighborhood, a noticeable change from their uncharacteristically comfortable life in St. Petersburg.

Having settled first in New York City, Strauss headed west when the gold rush heated up in San Francisco. Expanding his family’s dry goods business, he partnered with Jacob Davis, a tailor from Reno, Nevada, to patent and produce the long-lasting, reliable workwear that lived well beyond the gold rush: blue jeans.

Passing on the wealth of his empire, Strauss became one of the most prolific philanthropists of San Francisco, providing 28 scholarships to the University of California, Berkeley, and supporting several charities.

By the time Strauss passed away in 1902, he’d amassed a fortune of $6 million and helped establish a brand that, today, boasts $4.6B in annual revenue and employs over 13,000 people worldwide.

A young computer enthusiast, Brin excelled in computer science and attended Stanford University where he met future Google co-founder, Larry Page, and released the first version of Google in 1996.

Starting life in rural Ukraine, it would have been hard to imagine that Jan Koum would one day start and sell a billion-dollar company.

After graduating from Brown, she started several successful tech businesses in the Bay Area and, in 2006, Sinha leveraged her tech background to develop Slideshare, combining the power of social media and information sharing.

In 2012, LinkedIn purchased SlideShare for just over $118M leading Sinha to return to life as an entrepreneur.

Now a 101-year-old architecture and design icon, I.M. Pei was born in China, moving to the United States in 1935 to study architecture. Briefly advising the National Defense Resource Council on strategically bombing Japanese and German infrastructure, Pei eventually returned to his passion for creation.

Immigrating from South Korea to Southern California, Toni Ko came up in a family of entrepreneurs, working in her family’s cosmetics business from the ages of 13 to 25.

Realizing she wanted to leave the family business, Ko started her own venture, a cosmetics brand that took on luxury brands at affordable prices, NYX Cosmetics. As the company smashed sales goals and the 2008 financial crisis sent shoppers in search of affordable products, NYX Cosmetics products found their way from Ko’s rented 600-square-foot storefront to the shelves of major retailers.

With little money or opportunity, Grove worked odd jobs and studied chemical engineering, eventually earning his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

What Grove is best known for is something that changed technology forever: revolutionizing Intel and microprocessors. As CEO and President, Grove grew Intel to the 7th largest company in the world and employed 64,000 people during his leadership.

Pierre Omidyar, born in Paris to Iranian immigrant parents, arrived in Baltimore because of his father’s medical residency at Johns Hopkins University. As Omidyar and his interest in computers grew, so did his early entrepreneurial attempts that led to varied success.

As collectors took to the site, eBay’s popularity and profitability grew, quickly becoming one of the most visited websites on the Internet and changing the way people buy and sell.

Bali’s first exposure to the Internet introduced him to mathematics forums that provided the knowledge and growth he missed at school, leading him to place second in the International Math Olympiads.

Seeing the potential for online education, Bali built a company with co-founder Oktay Caglar in Turkey for six years before moving to the Silicon Valley area to continue their work on what would become Udemy, an online course, and learning platform.

Nearly twenty years later, Grove’s words are even more relevant as America continues to succeed as a nation of immigrants and entrepreneurs despite misguided nationalist policies and short-sighted challenges to legal immigration.

It has been immigrants, bringing their unique skills, resilience, and diversity from abroad, who have made America great, from Main Street to Wall Street.

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