Immigrants and American Economic Development

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Immigrants and their children account for a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs and CEOs of technology companies. Half of the graduate students in engineering, math and science in US universities are foreigners. In the past, a high percent stayed in the United States after graduation. Immigrants are founders or current CEOs of most of America’s leading tech companies. (Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, AMD, Intel)

 

The economic impact and importance of companies founded by immigrants or their children.

  • More than 46 percent of Fortune 500 companies in 2025 (231 out of 500) were founded by immigrants or their children, including:
    • 109 companies founded by immigrants.
    • 122 companies founded by children of immigrants.
  • Among the 14 companies that appeared on the Fortune 500 list for the first time this year, 10 were founded by immigrants or their children.
  • In fiscal year 2024, these 231 Fortune 500 companies generated $8.6 trillion in revenue—an amount that, if compared with national GDPs, would rank as the third-largest economy globally.
  • These 231 Fortune 500 companies employed over 15.4 million people worldwide, a number that’s comparable to the population of the fifth-largest U.S. state.

 

American Immigration Council, “Key Findings,” August 20, 2025.


Notable immigrants or their children who were important to the development of US technology. 

Katalin "Kati" Karikó (mRNA and Covid vaccine), Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison (electricity), Andrew Carnegie (steel), David Sarnoff (radio and TV), Hyman Rickover (nuclear submarines), large number of European refugees who designed the atomic bomb in WWII, Andrew Grove (microchips), John von Neumann (computers), German scientists (rockets and space program).

 

Many major U.S. technology companies are led by foreign-born CEOs. Below are 10 prominent examples:

 

1.         Sundar Pichai (Google/Alphabet): Born in India.

2.         Satya Nadella (Microsoft): Born in India.

3.         Jensen Huang (NVIDIA): Born in Taiwan. 

 4.         Arvind Krishna (IBM): Born in India.

5.         Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX): Born in South Africa.

6.         Lisa Su (AMD): Born in Taiwan.

7.         Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber): Born in Iran.

8.         Safra Catz (Oracle): Born in Israel.

9.         Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks): Born in India.

10.      Shantanu Narayen (Adobe): Born in India. 

 

 

Eight Tech Company Founders Who Came to the U.S. as Immigrants

 

  •  Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba (OpenAI): Born in the Soviet Union and Poland.
  •  Noubar Afeyan (Moderna): Born in Lebanon.

•           Jerry Yang, Yahoo. Born in Taiwan in 1968. 

•           Pierre Omidyar, eBay.

•           Sergey Brin, Google.

•           Elon Musk, PayPal/Tesla/SpaceX/Xai.

•           Peter Thiel, PayPal/Palantir/Facebook.

•           Jan Koum, WhatsApp.

 

Other Notable Mentions:

 

•           Fidji Simo (Instacart): Born in France.

•           Tony Xu (DoorDash): Born in China.

•           Patrick Collison (Stripe): Born in Ireland.

•           Ali Ghodsi (Databricks): Born in Iran.

•           Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron Technology): Born in India.

If you survived Covid, you can thank Katalin "Kati" Karikó (Hungary)

If you use an iPod or iPhone, you can thank Jony Ivey (Britain)

If you use AI, you can thank Geoffrey Hinton (Canada)


For a discussion of demographics and immigration in the US, and what these trends might mean for future economic growth, see


Demographics, Immigration and Future Economic Growth of the United States 

 


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