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Answer from Software Engineer Aaron Yip:
As the 1900s began, Germany was one of the most industrialized countries of its time (after Great Britain and Argentina) and was perfectly poised to become the greatest superpower in history, with the largest military, for the next 50 years.
The German Empire and its territories would soon produce the vast majority of future Nobel Prize winners and many of the great minds of the 20th century, including Max Born, Hans Bethe, Alexander Grothendieck, Bernard Katz, Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Walter Kohn, Hans Adolf Krebs, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, and Albert Einstein.
All these people were forced to flee the German Empire. Where did they go? Well…
The United States today is world-renowned for its universities and industry giants, from Apple, Google, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Dropbox, and Uber, to Sun Microsystems, Intel, Yahoo!, and IBM, to Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, AT&T, Goldman Sachs, eBay, United States Steel, Ford, and General Electric.
Albert Einstein, a refugee from Germany, took refuge in Princeton and changed the world forever in many ways: on the eve of World War II, he wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that sparked the Manhattan Project, where Italian refugees Hans Bethe and Enrico Fermi, future Nobel Prize winners, ran the laboratory that invented the atomic bomb that ended World War II for America.
Nobel Prize winners with immigrant roots
Abdel Fattah Jandali is a political immigrant from Homs, a city destroyed by the Syrian civil war. Jandali began his college career at the American University of Beirut, but protests eventually forced him to flee Lebanon. He completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University in the United States and his PhD in economics at the University of Wisconsin. There he met and began a relationship with Joan Carol Schiebl, a German-Swiss Catholic. She became pregnant, and they adopted the child in San Francisco. The adoptive couple named the child Steve Jobs.
In the late 1960s, Michael and Eugenia Brin and their sons left the Soviet Union to escape anti-Semitism. Michael Brin became a professor at the University of Maryland, and Eugenia Brin became a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Their son, Sergey Brin, received an NSF fellowship to attend Stanford University. He met Larry Page, and the two became close friends and transformed information technology. Google was born from a $100,000 investment by German immigrant Andy Bechtolsheim, a Stanford graduate and co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
Taiwanese-born Steve Chen founded YouTube. Ukrainian-born Jan Koum founded WhatsApp. Brazilian Mike Krieger founded Instagram. Dropbox founder Arash Ferdowsi is Iranian-American. Uber founder Travis Kalanick was born to Polish and Russian Jewish immigrants. Hungarian-born Andrew Grove founded Intel. Taiwanese-born Jerry Yang founded Yahoo, German-born Herman Hollerith founded IBM, and German-born Charles Pfizer and Charles Ehrhart founded Pfizer. AT&T? Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell. P&G? English-born William Procter and Irish-born James Gamble. Goldman Sachs? German-born Marcus Goldman. French-born Pierre Omidyar founded eBay. Scottish-American Andrew Carnegie founded U.S. Steel and Carnegie Mellon University. Irishman William Ford and his daughter Mary Ford, daughter of Belgian immigrants, raised Henry Ford, who founded the Industrial Revolution, the automobile, and the Ford Motor Company. General Electric’s Thomas Edison was born to a Canadian father. Walt Disney, Amazon, Boeing, Citigroup, Kroger, Costco, Home Depot, Walgreens, State Farm Insurance, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, McDonald’s, the list goes on and on.
Fortune 500 companies with immigrant roots
These companies employ more than 19 million people worldwide and generate a combined revenue of $4.8 trillion in the U.S. in 2014, more than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China, and Japan. Immigrants are twice as likely as non-immigrants to start a new business. Seven of the world’s 10 most valuable brands are U.S. companies founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Born in 1936, the Luo boy was born on the shores of Lake Victoria, outside Kendu Bay, British Kenya. As he grew up, he traveled widely, including to Europe, India, and Zanzibar, and in Nairobi he became a missionary cook and a local herbalist. In 1960, he enrolled at the University of Hawaii, where he met and began a relationship with an American woman, Stanley Ann Dunham. Their son, Barack Obama, became the seventh president of the United States, the son of immigrant parents that included Thomas Jefferson.
Stanford Professor Maryam Mirzakhani was born in Iran in 1977. Twenty-two years later, she began her doctoral studies at Harvard University. At 37, she became the first woman to win mathematics’ highest honor, the Fields Medal, joining an extremely narrow circle that also included the Australian-American mathematician Terence Tao.
Harvard University Professor Pardis Sabeti was born in Iran in 1975 and left before the Iranian Revolution. Professor Sabeti pioneered the use of genetic sequencing to track and monitor the 2014 Ebola outbreak, establishing key measures to control the virus and prevent future outbreaks.
Iranian-American Firouz Naderi served the U.S. government for 36 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he led the missions of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers to Mars. For his contributions to the advancement of space exploration, Naderi received NASA’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award.
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla. Reuters
South African Elon Musk is making his Mars dreams come true through his work at SpaceX. In his bio, Musk said that the reason he chose to move to the US was because “the US is definitely ahead in terms of the culture of innovation. If you want to achieve great things, there’s no better place than the US.”
This is absolutely correct.
But let’s imagine a slightly different world – one in which Maryam Mirzakhani and Pardis Sabeti are Canadian professors, Apple and Google are Canadian companies, Carnegie Mellon University and the Industrial Revolution were founded in Canada, and YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Dropbox, Uber, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Yahoo!, IBM, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, AT&T, Goldman Sachs, eBay, Boeing, Citigroup, Kroger, Costco, Home Depot, Walgreens, State Farm Insurance, Lockheed Martin, Walt Disney, Oracle, Amazon, McDonald’s, and countless other companies were founded in Canada.
Imagine Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Vinod Khosla heading up a Canadian internet giant.
Our country has been characterized throughout history as welcoming others when they oppressed us.
The most American thing is unconditional love: the love that ended wars, the love that helped build everything from YouTube and Instagram to McDonalds and Disney, the love that discovered new laws of physics, pushed the boundaries of the universe and saved countless lives across Earth.
The most American thing to do is to cry out boldly and resolutely: “Give me the tired, the poor, the throngs yearning to breathe free, the wretched rejects on the choppy shore. Send me this homeless people, this storm-breathing people.”
They were some of the greatest minds of the last century and helped transform America into a global center of innovation in areas ranging from technology and politics to the sciences and arts.
That is our American brand. That is true greatness. Let’s Make America Great Again.
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