But this isn’t just a story about Harvard. Or even about visas. It’s about forgetting who built the house.
Procter & Gamble, DuPont, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs—these are not startups. They’re the foundation. Every one of them was started by immigrants.
William Procter (England) and James Gamble (Ireland) met in Ohio and created a soap company now worth $380 billion. Éleuthère Irénée du Pont fled revolutionary France and built an American chemical empire. Pfizer began in a Brooklyn lab run by two German cousins. Marcus Goldman, a Jewish immigrant, opened a small office in Manhattan. That became Goldman Sachs.
“Immigrant names are stitched into every fabric of the American economy—soap, steel, medicine, money.”
And if you want tech, start with the browser you’re using.
Google? Sergey Brin came from the Soviet Union. eBay? Pierre Omidyar, born in France to Iranian parents. Yahoo’s Jerry Yang emigrated from Taiwan. Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya fled Turkey. Levi Strauss came from Bavaria. John Nordstrom, from Sweden. AT&T began with a Scottish immigrant. Warner Bros. was built by Polish Jews.
These weren’t side characters. They built American industry.
“They didn’t just integrate into America—they created it.”
Today’s international students aren’t different. They’re just next.
Nearly one in four U.S. billion-dollar startups was co-founded by someone who first arrived on a student visa. These companies—Stripe, Grammarly, SpaceX, OpenAI—have created tens of thousands of jobs. The average international-student-founded startup supports over 850 American workers.
This isn’t theory. It’s payroll.
In 2023–24 alone, international students contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy. That’s tuition, rent, groceries, tech purchases, hospital visits. They supported nearly 380,000 U.S. jobs—without taking anyone else’s. They are a net economic engine, not a drain.
And most of them stay.
Students from India, Nigeria, and Brazil remain in the U.S. at overwhelming rates—up to 80%—contributing long after graduation. Many start with Optional Practical Training (OPT), then move into H-1B jobs. They settle. They innovate. They buy homes. They hire.
“The pipeline doesn’t end at graduation. That’s where it starts.”
But now the message is different: Stay, and we might still come for you.
Since January, ICE has purged more than 4,700 student records. DHS calls it enforcement. Civil liberties attorneys call it mass expulsion. Visas are being pulled for petty infractions, protests, or just suspicions.
At Tufts, a Turkish student was jailed for co-writing an op-ed. At Penn, a Nigerian grad lost her job after her visa was delayed for “security review.” In Florida, a Bangladeshi student was barred from his lab over a dismissed misdemeanor.