# Who is the greatest immigrant in American history?

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

*By YPB Team · Published September 1, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-greatest-immigrant-in-american-history*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Albert Einstein** — score 1000/1000
   Left Germany in 1933, settled at Princeton, and made the US the centre of theoretical physics.
2. **Andrew Carnegie** — score 632/1000
   Scottish weaver's son who built the American steel industry and then gave the money away.
3. **Irving Berlin** — score 580/1000
   Born in Imperial Russia, wrote 'God Bless America' and much of the Great American Songbook.
4. **Levi Strauss** — score 523/1000
   Bavarian dry-goods merchant whose riveted work trousers became the American uniform.
5. **Wernher von Braun** — score 479/1000
   German rocket engineer, brought over after the war, who built the Saturn V.
6. **Hedy Lamarr** — score 428/1000
   Austrian film star and inventor whose frequency-hopping patent underpins modern wireless.
7. **Nikola Tesla** — score 371/1000
   Arrived from Europe in 1884, naturalised in 1891, and gave America its alternating-current grid.
8. **Joseph Pulitzer** — score 371/1000
   Hungarian immigrant who reinvented the newspaper and endowed the prize that carries his name.
9. **Elizabeth Blackwell** — score 306/1000
   English-born, and the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.
10. **An Wang** — score 306/1000
   Shanghai-born engineer whose Wang Laboratories put word processing on office desks.
11. **Alexander Hamilton** — score 306/1000
   Born in the Caribbean, arrived as a teenager, and designed the American financial system.
12. **Alexander Graham Bell** — score 231/1000
   Scottish-born, Canada then Boston, and the telephone patent that built AT&T.
13. **Enrico Fermi** — score 143/1000
   Fled Fascist Italy in 1938 and built the first nuclear reactor under a Chicago stadium.
14. **Madeleine Albright** — score 143/1000
   Czech-born refugee who became the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State.
15. **Sergey Brin** — score 143/1000
   Left the Soviet Union at six and co-founded Google two decades later.
16. **Arnold Schwarzenegger** — score 143/1000
   Austrian bodybuilder who became a film star and then governor of California.

Tags: historical-figures, usa, science