The 51 Greatest Immigrants in American History

Arrived with a suitcase and changed the country that took them in. The fields run from physics to jeans to newspapers.

1. 1
   Albert Einstein

   Left Germany in 1933, settled at Princeton, and made the US the centre of theoretical physics.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Andrew Carnegie

   Scottish weaver's son who built the American steel industry and then gave the money away.
   632pts
3. 3
   Irving Berlin

   Born in Imperial Russia, wrote 'God Bless America' and much of the Great American Songbook.
   580pts
4. 4
   Levi Strauss

   Bavarian dry-goods merchant whose riveted work trousers became the American uniform.
   523pts
5. 5
   Wernher von Braun

   German rocket engineer, brought over after the war, who built the Saturn V.
   479pts
6. 6
   Hedy Lamarr

   Austrian film star and inventor whose frequency-hopping patent underpins modern wireless.
   428pts
7. 7
   Nikola Tesla

   Arrived from Europe in 1884, naturalised in 1891, and gave America its alternating-current grid.
   371pts
8. 8
   Joseph Pulitzer

   Hungarian immigrant who reinvented the newspaper and endowed the prize that carries his name.
   371pts
9. 9
   Elizabeth Blackwell

   English-born, and the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.
   306pts
10. 10
    An Wang

    Shanghai-born engineer whose Wang Laboratories put word processing on office desks.
    306pts
11. 11
    Alexander Hamilton

    Born in the Caribbean, arrived as a teenager, and designed the American financial system.
    306pts
12. 12
    Alexander Graham Bell

    Scottish-born, Canada then Boston, and the telephone patent that built AT&T.
    231pts
13. 13
    Enrico Fermi

    Fled Fascist Italy in 1938 and built the first nuclear reactor under a Chicago stadium.
    143pts
14. 14
    Madeleine Albright

    Czech-born refugee who became the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State.
    143pts
15. 15
    Sergey Brin

    Left the Soviet Union at six and co-founded Google two decades later.
    143pts
16. 16
    Arnold Schwarzenegger

    Austrian bodybuilder who became a film star and then governor of California.
    143pts
17. 17
    John Muir

    Scottish-born naturalist who campaigned for Yosemite and co-founded the Sierra Club, earning the title father of the national parks.
18. 18
    Elon Musk

    South African-born entrepreneur who arrived via Canada, became a US citizen in 2002 and built Tesla and SpaceX.
19. 19
    Alfred Hitchcock

    London-born director who moved to Hollywood in 1939, became a US citizen in 1955 and made Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho there.
20. 20
    Hannah Arendt

    German-Jewish refugee who reached New York in 1941 and wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem.
21. 21
    Mary Pickford

    Toronto-born silent star known as America's Sweetheart, who co-founded United Artists and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
22. 22
    Thomas Paine

    Englishman who arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 and two years later wrote Common Sense, the pamphlet that argued the colonies into independence.
23. 23
    Carl Schurz

    German revolutionary of 1848 who became a Union general, the first German-born US senator and Secretary of the Interior.
24. 24
    Jacob Riis

    Danish carpenter turned New York reporter whose photographs in How the Other Half Lives forced the city to reform its tenements.
25. 25
    Samuel Gompers

    London-born cigar maker who founded the American Federation of Labor and led it for nearly four decades.
26. 26
    John Jacob Astor

    German butcher's son who built a fur-trading empire and New York property holdings that made him America's first multi-millionaire.
27. 27
    Knute Rockne

    Norwegian-born coach who made Notre Dame a national football power with five unbeaten seasons and popularised the forward pass.
28. 28
    Igor Sikorsky

    Kyiv-born aviation pioneer who emigrated in 1919 and built the first practical American helicopter, the VS-300, in 1939.
29. 29
    Andrew Grove

    Hungarian refugee who fled in 1956, became Intel's third employee and ran the company through its rise to chip-industry dominance.
30. 30
    Jensen Huang

    Taiwan-born engineer who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and turned its graphics chips into the engine of the artificial-intelligence boom.
31. 31
    I. M. Pei

    Guangzhou-born architect who came to study in 1935 and designed the Louvre Pyramid, the National Gallery East Building and the JFK Library.
32. 32
    Henry Kissinger

    Fled Nazi Germany as a teenager in 1938 and became National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford.
33. 33
    John von Neumann

    Budapest-born mathematician at Princeton who shaped game theory, the Manhattan Project and the architecture of the stored-program computer.
34. 34
    Frances Xavier Cabrini

    Italian nun who arrived in 1889 to serve immigrants, founded 67 institutions and became the first US citizen canonised a saint.
35. 35
    Bob Hope

    London-born comedian who emigrated as a child and entertained American troops on USO tours across half a century.
36. 36
    Cary Grant

    Bristol-born Archibald Leach who arrived with a stage troupe in 1920 and became Hollywood's definitive leading man.
37. 37
    Frank Capra

    Sicilian-born director who arrived aged five and made It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life.
38. 38
    Billy Wilder

    Austrian-born director who fled the Nazis and made Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment.
39. 39
    George Balanchine

    Saint Petersburg-trained choreographer who came in 1933, co-founded New York City Ballet and created American ballet as an art form.
40. 40
    Ayn Rand

    Saint Petersburg-born writer who emigrated in 1926 and wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, still bestsellers decades later.
41. 41
    Vladimir Nabokov

    Russian émigré who reached America in 1940, taught at Cornell and wrote Lolita and Pale Fire in his adopted English.
42. 42
    Martina Navratilova

    Defected from Czechoslovakia in 1975, became a US citizen in 1981 and won 18 major singles titles, nine of them at Wimbledon.
43. 43
    Hakeem Olajuwon

    Lagos-born centre who came to Houston for college, won two NBA titles with the Rockets and became a US citizen in 1993.
44. 44
    Michael Pupin

    Serbian shepherd boy who arrived with five cents and became a Columbia physicist whose loading coils made long-distance telephony possible.
45. 45
    Adolphus Busch

    German brewer's son who joined his father-in-law's St. Louis brewery and built Anheuser-Busch into America's largest beer maker.
46. 46
    Albert A. Michelson

    Prussian-born physicist who measured the speed of light and in 1907 became the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science.
47. 47
    Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

    Indian-born astrophysicist at the University of Chicago who worked out the mass limit of white dwarfs and won the 1983 Nobel Prize.
48. 48
    Albert Gallatin

    Geneva-born Treasury Secretary for Jefferson and Madison, the longest-serving in history, who paid down the national debt and funded the Louisiana Purchase.
49. 49
    Gloria Estefan

    Havana-born singer who fled to Miami as a child and took Latin pop into the American mainstream with Miami Sound Machine.
50. 50
    Carlos Santana

    Mexican-born guitarist whose band played Woodstock in 1969 and whose album Supernatural won the Grammy for Album of the Year three decades later.
51. 51
    Yo-Yo Ma

    Paris-born cellist of Chinese parents who moved to New York at seven and became the most celebrated classical musician of his generation.

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