My name is Gurdev S. Gill, MD, and the below bullet points are found in the June/July 2026 issue of Forbes magazine in an article titled “Why America Doesn’t Work Without Immigrants”, which was compiled and written by Giacomo Tognini and Luisa Kroll.
1994 - 2023 - Immigrants in the US generated fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion
Immigrants hold one in four US patents (Deloitte Insights cited)
Immigrants’ total spending power in 2023 was $1.7 trillion
Noubar Afeyan (Lebanese Armenian) came to the US in 1975 and has 100 patents and co-founded Covid vaccine maker (Moderna) in 2010
Nvidia, Google, Microsoft & Tesla founded by immigrants
There are 189 billionaires who are foreign born with a collective worth of $2.4 trillion
Companies founded and run by immigrants
employ more than one million people and 141 of these are now citizens. Among them are three of the ten richest people on the planet: Elon Musk, Jensen Huang and Sergey Brin.
Eric Yuan - Zoom’s founder
Aravind Srinivas, research scientist at Open AI, Deep Mind & Perplexity
Children of immigrants are more successful than locals (Leah Boustan cited)
Baiju Bhatt - Robinhood co-founder
Alexis Ohanian - Redditt co-founder
Ratmir Timashev - founded software companies
Sanjay Gajendra - AI Astera Labs co-founder
Immigrants are 80% more likely to start businesses than locals (MIT cited)
Today more than one in five business owners (1.3 million are immigrants Immigration Research Initiative cited)
Immigrants or their children founded 46% of America’s 500 largest corporations (American Immigration Council cited)
19% of STEM workers were foreign born
19% of health workers come from outside US (American Immigration Council cited) More than one in four physicians and surgeons are immigrants ( Kaiser Foundation cited) 25% of workforce in agriculture and construction are immigrants
Shahid Kahn owns companies that make auto parts
Forbes was founded by a Scottish immigrant
The United States as a nation was built by the immigrants and by more immigrants as clearly reflected by this timely article in the Forbes publication.
- Dr. Gurdev S Gill, Lubbock
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This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Lubbock doctor shares letter touting contributions of immigrants in U.S.
