The Ongoing Role of Immigrants

by | Paul S. Boyer

People of many nationalities and ethnic groups made fundamental contributions to American business throughout the nation’s history.

The early Treasury secretaries Alexander Hamilton (from the West Indies) and Albert Gallatin (from Switzerland) played vital roles in shaping a national economy hospitable to entrepreneurship.

Immigrant businessmen formed companies that became internationally leading firms. In 1837, for example, William Procter, a candlemaker from England, and James Gamble, a soap boiler from Ireland, founded Procter and Gamble, which became the world’s largest consumer‐products company. John Jacob Astor, a poor immigrant from Germany, amassed a vast fortune in the fur trade, transoceanic commerce, and New York City real estate. Daniel McCallum (Scotland), general superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad, published the earliest known treatise on business administration in 1855.

In the 1870s, while working for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, Albert Fink (Germany) devised such an ingenious method of separating fixed costs from variable costs (a distinction vital in accounting and business planning) that he later became known as the “Father of Railway Economics.” Andrew Carnegie, who emigrated from Scotland, became the world’s greatest steel magnate.

Twentieth‐century immigrants continued to make vital contributions to American business. David Sarnoff, born in a Russian shtetl, emigrated to the United States as a boy. Without formal education beyond the eighth grade, he became the architect and chief executive officer of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a leader in radio network broadcasting (NBC, 1926) and television research and development. Other Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, such as Samuel Goldwyn (Poland) and Louis B. Mayer (Russia), built movie studios that made Hollywood the world’s entertainment capital.

During the 1970s, An Wang (China) innovated in producing mini‐computers and office workstations. In the 1980s, Roberto Gouizeta (Cuba) became chief executive officer (CEO) of the Coca‐Cola Company and led it to unprecedented growth. In the 1990s, Alex Trotman (Scotland) served as CEO of the Ford Motor Company and presided over its “globalization.”

Just as the “American” business achievement drew freely on the abilities of diverse immigrants, so did business‐related American science and technology. In the 1790s, during the First Industrial Revolution, Samuel Slater (England) brought the power loom to the budding American textile industry. The du Pont family (France) founded a small gunpowder firm in 1802 that eventually became the world’s leading chemical company. In the early twentieth century, Charles Steinmetz (Germany), the resident inventive genius at General Electric, led that company’s move into high‐tech products.

In the 1930s and 1940s, a cadre of brilliant physicists, chemists, and mathematicians fleeing Nazi Europe, including as Albert Einstein (Germany), Enrico Fermi (Italy), Niels Bohr (Denmark), Hans Bethe (Germany), and John von Neumann (Hungary), advanced the frontiers of American science. Augmenting this distinguished group were immigrant German rocket scientists who had worked for the Nazi regime, the best‐known of whom was Werner von Braun. Much of late‐twentieth‐century American leadership electronics, nuclear, and aerospace derived from the scientific and entrepreneurial talents of immigrants. Andrew Grove (Hungary), a key figure in the rise of Intel Corporation, played such a key role in the development of microprocessors that Time magazines named him its “Person of the Year” for 1997. Intel and hundreds of other information‐technology firms, including Hewlett‐Packard, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Cisco Systems, set up their headquarters in California’s Silicon Valley, southeast of San Francisco. Collectively, these companies spearheaded American economic growth at the turn of the twenty‐first century—and became a powerful magnet for still another flood of immigrant talent, notably from East Asia and South Asia.

Paul S. Boyer The Oxford Companion to United States History. Oxford University

Comments

Anonymous said…
Whenever I teach my American Politics & Culture courses, I emphasize precisely the argument made above. The lifeblood of America, its strength, and its soul, comes from its immigrant roots and the continuing proces of absorbing people from divergent cultures... When some Americans speak out agianst immigrants, one wonders where they think their ancestors came from???
troy mcgrath, moscow
Silvia Terigi said…
thank you this is the point,that never we have to forget about THE ROOTS , nothing was created by itself , and there are no way of development or growing without inmigration in any country , only just to create the right policy that this movement could be positive for the country and the society , of course i m against of illegal inmigrants , but there are many ways to stop this , without discrimination and protests , it is an action of the respective countries that are involved, everyone has the right to be free of choice where want to be and live , but considering the rules and that nothing is granted, The concientization and open dialogue is the only way to stop the illegals inmigration , sometimes doing the right things is more easier than doing by other wrong way, that leads to create troubles more than an opportunity ,
just i wanted to make a reflexion how important is the input of cultures , to grow and the consecquences .