Apple, eBay and Oracle are among the companies built by first- or second-generation Americans from a country President Trump has now banned immigration from.
Had the father of the late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, tried to enter the country today, he would have been turned away. He is Syrian.
Oracle co-founder Bob Miner is the son of Iranian immigrants. And eBay is the brain child of Pierre Omidyar, whose Iranian parents came to the U.S. from France in the 1970s, according to a 2011 report from the Partnership for a New American Economy.
Omidyar was among the first tech executives to publicly chide Trump’s decision to ban immigration from seven majority-Muslim nations — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — affecting an estimated 134 million people.
He called Trump’s executive order “simple bigotry.”
Trump’s anti-immigration tone sparked angry statements across the business community, particularly in tech. Execs and commentators called out the important contributions immigrants have made to the American economy.
A large number of companies whose brands are household names were built by immigrants.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is from Taiwan. Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, built the company that morphed into AT&T and Verizon. He was Scottish.
The late Andrew Grove, who transformed Intel into a global giant, was Hungarian. Google’s Sergey Brin was born in Russia. Procter & Gamble’s co-founders were from England and Ireland.
A slew of other corporate powerhouses were built by the children of immigrants.
Amazon creator Jeff Bezos is the son of a Cuban father. Brothers Walt and Roy Disney — of Disney — were born to a Canadian father. And both parents of the brothers who built the world famous McDonald’s burger chain were immigrants from Ireland.