World's Most Successful Immigrants

Immigrant Bosses Around the World

Among the thorny issues President Barack Obama faces this year is immigration reform. The current system of managing immigration flows into the U.S. is widely acknowledged to be failing, with some 11.5 million undocumented workers in the country, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. President Obama wants to turn many of these illegal immigrants into citizens, but the shaky economy and high unemployment rate make such liberalization of policy a hot-button issue. This despite the fact that immigrants run many of the top companies in the U.S. Here's a look (arranged in alphabetical order) at some of the men and women who left their home countries and went on to become some of the world's most successful corporate leaders.

U.S. Immigration Battle Heats Up

With Congress set to consider bills that deal with illegal immigrants and H-1B visa abuse, President Obama may find immigration reform a tough promise to keep

From Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born 19th-century steel baron, to Roberto C. Goizueta, the Cuban exile who led Coca-Cola (KO) through most the 1980s and '90s, immigrants have been at the helm of many of America's top companies.

That's just as true today, even as politicians in Washington argue about whether to embark on immigration reform. Without immigrants, there would be no Google (GOOG), co-founded by Russian-born Sergey Brin. Two of the three people who launched YouTube were immigrants, too: Steven Chen, originally from Taiwan, and Jawed Karim, born in Germany. Immigrants also helped start Yahoo! (YHOO), eBay (EBAY), and Sun Microsystems (JAVA).

It's not just Silicon Valley that has depended on immigrants. They're also prominent in the world of finance, thanks to people like billionaire George Soros, former World Bank chief James Wolfensohn and Berkshire Hathaway's Ajit Jain (a possible successor to Warren Buffet.

Like Jain, many of the most successful immigrants in Corporate America today are from India. Indra Nooyi, who went to college in the southern Indian city of Chennai and earned an MBA in Kolkata, is the CEO of PepsiCo (PEP). Sanjay Jha, another Indian immigrant, is the co-CEO at Motorola (MOT). Vikram Pandit, born in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, is chairman and CEO of Citigroup (C).

Despite the successful role immigrants have played in U.S. business, many Americans are worried about losing their jobs to immigrants or having their work outsourced to foreigners in the U.S. on short-term visas. That could make it more difficult for President Barack Obama to keep his promise to push for immigration reform. On Aug. 20, the President met with pro-immigrant activists in the White House and pledged not to let fights over health-care reform and energy legislation put the immigration issue on the back burner. Obama is hoping to do better than President George W. Bush, who failed in his effort last year to pass immigration reform.

Dueling Reform Bills in Congress

The battle could start heating up as soon as next month. Obama is likely to support the efforts of Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Senate's immigration subcommittee, who has said he will introduce new reform legislation this autumn that will crack down on illegal immigration. "We must create a system that converts the current flow of unskilled illegal immigrants into the United States into a more manageable and controlled flow of legal immigrants who can be absorbed by our economy," the senator said in a speech outlining his proposals in June.

However, he and Obama face some tough challenges. For instance, Illinois senator and fellow Democrat Richard Durbin is a co-sponsor of a bill to crack down on alleged abuse of H-1B visas, which allow companies to employ workers from overseas for limited stays.

Durbin and the bill's co-sponsor, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), have introduced legislation to limit the granting of H-1Bs, visas that are especially popular among U.S. tech companies like Microsoft (MSFT) as well as Indian IT services outsourcers like Infosys (INFY) and Wipro (WIT). The proposal has led to intense opposition in India. "It's a very drastic initiative," Wipro Chairman Azim Premji told BusinessWeek in May. "It will choke the United States of talent coming in."

Ironically, the latest immigration fight will take place at a time when the U.S. has become a less attractive destination for many immigrants. Because of the recession, there's less demand for low-cost labor. But the U.S. is also turning out to be less attractive for highly educated workers, too. James Chu, chairman and CEO of ViewSonic, the privately held maker of PC monitors, immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan in 1986 and launched the company that became Walnut (Calif.)-based ViewSonic a few years later. However, he says, "if today I were young, I would probably choose China." For young entrepreneurs around the world, "if you want a good environment and a good education, the U.S. of course will still be the choice for a long period of time," says Chu, speaking while on a business trip in China. However, "if you want a place that's a challenge and exciting, China is probably the one."

American universities are feeling the impact of the declining appeal of the U.S. for potential immigrants. According to a new report by the Council of Graduate Schools, admission offers to prospective students from outside the U.S. fell 3% this year. Fueling the drop was a decline in interest from India and Korea, with Indian admissions falling 12% and Korean admissions down 9%.

One reason for the fall is the increasingly aggressive efforts by universities in Asia to recruit students who might have gone to the U.S. to study. "With the center of gravity in the global economy shifting to Asia, it's just natural for students from the U.S. and Europe to seek Asian experiences and networking opportunities through business schools in Asia," Suh Kil Soo, associate dean at Yonsei University Graduate School of Business, told BusinessWeek in May.



1.Shai Agassi



Better Place CEO
Born: 1968, Israel
Now lives in U.S.

The former SAP executive launched Project Better Place in 2007 with the goal of building electric cars and creating a network of recharging stations to support them. Agassi, who studied at the Technion, the Haifa-based school that is Israel's premier technology institute, is still an Israeli citizen but is now based in Silicon Valley. He has recruited Nissan and Renault Chairman Carlos Ghosn to support his project.



2.Ralph Alvarez



McDonald's president and chief operating officer
Born: 1955, Cuba
Now lives in U.S.

Alvarez's family settled in Florida after leaving Cuba, where his father was an airline executive. His mother taught at the University of Miami, where Alvarez received his bachelor's degree in business administration in 1976. (Today he's on the school's International Advisory Board as well as its President's Council.) He worked for Burger King and Wendy's before joining McDonald's (MCD) in 1994.



3.Sergey Brin



Google co-founder
Born: 1973, Russia
Now lives in U.S.

Google's (GOOG) co-founder grew up in Moscow during the Brezhnev era, when anti-Semitism flourished. After suffering from policies that forbade Jews from certain positions, Brin's parents moved the family to the U.S. in 1979. Brin studied at the University of Maryland and went on to launch Google with Larry Page when both were students at Stanford. Like Page, he is an investor in electric car pioneer Tesla Motors.



4.Morris Chang



TSMC chairman
Born: 1931, China
Now lives in Taiwan


Known as the father of Taiwan's chip industry, Chang grew up in China but left for the U.S. during the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. He received bachelor's and master's degrees from MIT and a PhD from Stanford, worked at Texas Instruments for 25 years, and became a U.S. citizen before moving to Taiwan to launch Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (TSM) in 1987. Since then, he has built the company into the world's largest foundry, or made-to-order chip manufacturer.



5.John Chen



Sybase chairman, CEO, and president
Born: 1955, Hong Kong
Now lives in U.S.

Hong Kong-born Chen has been the boss at Sybase (SY) since 1998. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Brown and a master's from Caltech. He is a member of Walt Disney's board of directors and sits on the President's Export Council, a U.S. advisory body on international trade.



6.Pehong Chen



BroadVision chairman, president, and CEO
Born: 1957, Taiwan
Now lives in U.S.

Chen is one of the most successful immigrants in Silicon Valley. He founded BroadVision (BVSN) in 1993 and before that was founder of Gain Technology (acquired by Sybase in 1992) and co-founder of Siebel Systems (acquired by Oracle in 2005). Chen has a PhD in computer science from Berkeley and is active in China, where he sits on the boards of Internet portal Sina (SINA) and software developer Ufida.



7.Steve Chen



YouTube co-founder
Born: 1978, Taiwan
Now lives in U.S.

YouTube's co-founder spent his early childhood in Taiwan, moving to the U.S. as a teen to attend high school. He went on to the University of Illinois and then PayPal. At the eBay-owned company he met Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley, with whom he launched YouTube in 2005. After the video-sharing service became hugely popular, Google (GOOG) acquired it a year later, earning Chen a payday of stock worth $326 million.



8.James Chu



ViewSonic chairman and CEO
Born: 1957, Taiwan
Now lives in U.S.

Taiwan-born Chu immigrated to the U.S. in 1986 to become president of U.S. operations at Taiwanese keyboard manufacturer Behavior Tech Computer. The following year he started Keypoint Technology, specializing in power supplies, keyboards, and PC monitors and other computer peripherals. In 1990, the company started making monitors under the brand name ViewSonic, and Chu soon made that the name of the company.



9.Francisco D'Souza



Cognizant CEO
Born: 1968, Kenya
Now lives in U.S.

D'Souza was born in Nairobi but went to college at the University of East Asia (now called the University of Macau). He then moved to the U.S. and received an MBA from Carnegie Mellon. He worked at Dun & Bradstreet for four years before joining Cognizant when the outsourcing company got started as a spin-off from Dun & Bradstreet in 1994.



10.Mohamed al-Fayed



Harrods Department Store executive chairman
Born: 1933, Egypt
Now lives in Britain

Fayed grew up in Alexandria and first went into business by launching a company that operated ferries in the Mediterranean and Red seas and in the late 1950s he and his two brothers moved their headquarters to Genoa. In the 1960s Fayed won business working on construction projects in Dubai. In 1985 he acquired control of Harrods. The British government has rejected the controversial businessman's attempts to gain citizenship. Fayed's son Dodi was Princess Diana's boyfriend and died with her in a 1997 car crash in Paris.



11.George Feldenkreis



Perry Ellis International
Born: 1935, Cuba
Now lives in U.S.

Feldenkreis, born in Havana to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, joined the exodus from Castro's Cuba in 1961, settling in Miami. There, he launched a company that specialized in school uniforms and tropical-themed shirts. The company, Supreme International, changed its name to Perry Ellis International after acquiring the brand in 1999. Feldenkreis is the founder of the Universal National Bank of Miami and is on the board of the University of Miami and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. His son Oscar is the company's president and chief operating officer.



12.Carlos Ghosn



Renault chairman, president, and CEO
Nissan chairman
Born: 1954, Brazil
Now lives in France and Japan

Ghosn, credited for turning around first Nissan (NSANY) and later Renault (RENA.PA), spent his early childhood in Brazil and then moved to Lebanon, his parents' home country. He moved to France to attend the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines de Paris. Ghosn worked in the tire industry for nearly two decades before joining Renault in 1996. He became boss at Nissan, in which the French automaker owned a large stake, in 1999 and in 2005 took the helm at Renault itself.



13.Andy Grove



Intel co-founder and former chairman
Born: 1936, Hungary
Now lives in U.S.

Grove wrote about his childhood, living as a Jew under first Nazi and then Communist rule, in his 2001 memoir, Swimming Across. Following the Soviet-backed crackdown in Hungary in 1956, Grove left Budapest for the U.S. He studied at City College of New York and Berkeley and worked at Fairchild Semiconductor before becoming one of the first employees at Intel (INTC), where he rose to become CEO and chairman.



14.Rajat Gupta



Genpact chairman
Born: 1948, India
Now lives in U.S.

The former managing director worldwide and senior partner worldwide for McKinsey & Co., Gupta maintains strong ties with his native India. Since 2007 he has been chairman of Genpact (G), which got its start in 1997 as the India-based business-process services operation of GE Capital. He is also chairman of the Indian School of Business and the India AIDS Initiative of the Gates Foundation, co-chairman of the Pan IIT Alumni Board, and a member of the American India Foundation.



15.William Heinecke



Minor International chairman and CEO
Born: 1949, U.S.
Now lives in Thailand

There are plenty of immigrants who move from Asia to the U.S. Heinecke is one of the rare examples of an immigrant going in the opposite direction. The U.S.-born businessman moved with his parents to Thailand as a child and he launched the Minor Group as a teenager. He later surrendered his U.S. passport and became a Thai citizen. Today he runs the country's largest operator of hotels and restaurants, including the Thai franchises of Four Seasons and Burger King.



16.Jen-Hsun Huang



Nvidia CEO
Born: 1963, Taiwan
Now lives in U.S.

The Oneida Baptist Institute in the hills of southeastern Kentucky is about as far from the bustling streets of Taipei as you can get. The Christian school is where Huang studied when he first arrived in the U.S. He later moved to the West Coast, getting a bachelor's degree from Oregon State and a master's from Stanford. He co-founded Nvidia (NVDA), a semiconductor-design company that specializes in graphics chips, in 1993.



17.Arianna Huffington



Huffington Post founder and editor-in-chief
Born: 1950, Greece
Now lives in U.S.

Huffington moved from her native Greece when she was 16 to Britain, where she studied economics at Cambridge. She first made a name for herself in the U.S. as a conservative columnist and wife of a millionaire Republican congressman from California, but after divorcing Michael Huffington in 1997, she shifted to the left and in 2005 launched the Huffington Post, a liberal-leaning news and blog site.



18.Ajit Jain



Berkshire Hathaway reinsurance division president
Born: 1951, India
Now lives in U.S.

Who could replace the Oracle of Omaha? How about the Oracle of Orissa? Speculation about a replacement for Warren Buffett often focuses on Jain. Born in Orissa, a state in eastern India, Jain studied engineering at IIT Kharagpur and worked for IBM in India before going to Harvard for an MBA and joining consultants McKinsey in 1978. He has been with Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) since 1986. In May, Buffett told investors Jain was irreplaceable, saying "Ajit is needed, and we won't find a substitute for him."



19.Sanjay Jha



Motorola co-CEO
Born: 1963, India
Now lives in U.S.

Jha has one of the toughest assignments in the world of telecom. The Indian-born engineer (with a PhD from Scotland's University of Strathclyde) became head of Motorola's (MOT) mobile devices division last year and is now trying to restore the company's position among the world's telecom elite. Before joining Motorola in 2008, Jha spent 14 years at Qualcomm, becoming COO in 2006.



20.Andrea Jung



Avon CEO
Born: 1958, Canada
Now lives in U.S.

Regularly named on lists of the world's most influential women in business, Jung was born in Toronto to Chinese immigrant parents and graduated magna cum laude from Princeton. She joined Avon (AVP) in 1994 from Neiman Marcus, where she was an executive vice-president, and within five years became Avon's CEO. She took the additional title of chairman in 2001.



21.Yue-Sai Kan



House of Yue-Sai founder
Born: 1949, China
Now lives in U.S. and China

Kan, whose father was a traditional Chinese painter, grew up in Hong Kong. After receiving a bachelor's degree in music from Brigham Young University-Hawaii, she moved to New York and started a trading company with her sister. Kan also began producing TV shows and in 1984 hosted a live broadcast from China for PBS, the public television network. The next year she became host for a show on China's state-owned CCTV network and in 1992 launched Yue-Sai Kan Cosmetics, which she sold to L'Oreal in 2004. Her company Yue-Sai Kan Productions supports the development of TV and film in China and her House of Yue-Sai operates a home-furnishings store in Shanghai.



22.Jawed Karim



YouTube co-founder
Born: 1979, Germany
Now lives in U.S.

Karim doesn't get as much publicity as YouTube's other co-founders, since he left the startup to attend graduate school at Stanford shortly after its launch. Karim—born to a German mother and a Bangladeshi father—was a co-worker with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley at PayPal when the three first began working on the video-sharing service. When Google (GOOG) bought YouTube, Kareem received shares worth more than $64 million. He is now one of the backers of San Francisco-based Dotblu, which runs a "social betting service" designed to let people turn Twitter and Facebook status updates into a game.



23.Gail Kelly



Westpac Banking Corp. CEO Born: 1956, South Africa
Now lives in Australia


Kelly is one of the most powerful businesswomen in Australia. The South African native moved to Oz in 1997 and became a citizen in 2001. In South Africa, she had been an executive at Nedcor Bank, one of the country's largest, and after moving to Australia she worked at Commonwealth Bank and St. George Bank, where she was CEO, before joining Westpac (WBC.AX) in 2008 as CEO.



24.Vinod Khosla



Kleiner Perkins general partner
Born: 1955, India
Now lives in U.S.

Khosla is one of the most successful Indian immigrants in Silicon Valley, but he begins the bio on his Web site with a failure: After studying engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, he tried—and failed—to launch a soy milk company for people without refrigerators. Khosla then moved to the U.S. and earned a master's degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and an MBA from Stanford. In 1982 he founded Sun Microsystems and in 1986 joined famed venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins as a general partner. In 2004 he launched Khosla Ventures to support his interest in issues related to the environment and poverty in the developing world.



25.Li Ka-shing



Hutchison Whampoa chairman
Born: 1928, China
Now lives in Hong Kong

Li moved to Hong Kong from nearby Guangdong province in southern China during World War II. Today he is Hong Kong's richest man, controlling a global property, telecom, ports and retail empire—not bad for a man who got his start selling plastic flowers. Through the Li Ka-shing Foundation, he is a major supporter of Shantou University, located near his hometown in Guangdong.



26.Frank Lowy



Westfield chairman
Born: 1933, Slovakia
Now lives in Australia

Lowy, one of the richest men in Australia, left Europe as a refugee after World War II and fought in the Haganah, the predecessor to the Israeli army, during Israel's War of Independence. A few years later, he moved to Australia, where he co-founded Westfield (WDC.AX) and built it into one of the world's top developers of shopping centers.



27.Nadir Mohamed



Rogers Communications CEO
Born: 1956, Tanzania
Now lives in Canada

Mohamed spent his childhood in Tanzania, the son of Ismaili Muslim parents originally from India. The family later emigrated to Canada and Mohamed studied accounting at the University of British Columbia. He joined Rogers (RCI), one of Canada's top telecom carriers, in 2000 and took the CEO job of the Toronto-based company in March of this year.



28.Indra Nooyi



PepsiCo CEO
Born: 1955, India
Now lives in U.S.

Pepsi's (PEP) boss, who is also the chairman of the U.S.-India Business Council, attended Madras Christian College in southern India and received an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata (Calcutta) before studying at Yale, where she got a master's in public and private management. Prior to joining Pepsi in 1994, she worked for ABB, Motorola, Boston Consulting Group and Johnson & Johnson. Nooyi was Pepsi's chief financial officer for five years before becoming president and CEO in 2006.



29.Pierre Omidyar



eBay founder and chairman
Born: 1967, France
Now lives in U.S.

The founder of eBay is an Iranian-American who moved with his parents from Paris to the U.S. as a child. After earning an engineering degree from Tufts, he headed west to the Bay Area, where he launched an auction site in 1995. Two years he later named it eBay. An active philanthropist through his foundation, the Omidyar Network, he and his wife, Pam, have donated $100 million to Tufts to create the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund, which aims to support the growth of lending to the poor. The gift is the largest in the history of the university.



30.Paul Oreffice



Fairfield Homes chairman
Born: 1927, Italy
Now lives in U.S.

Born in Venice, Oreffice fled war-torn Italy in 1940 with his family, moving to Ecuador and then, in 1945, to the U.S. to attend Purdue. He joined Dow Chemical after serving in the U.S. Army and went on to become the company's president and CEO in 1978. He later became chairman and retired from Dow Chemical in 1992. In addition to serving as chairman of Fairfield Homes, a developer of retirement communities, Oreffice is chairman of the National Parkinson's Foundation.



31.Vikram Pandit



Citigroup CEO
Born: 1957, India
Now lives in U.S.

The CEO of embattled financial giant Citi (C) was born in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. His father was an executive at a pharmaceutical company, and at age 16 Pandit moved to the U.S. to study engineering at Columbia, where he received several degrees, including a PhD. Pandit is now on the school's board of directors and also serves on the board of the Indian School of Business. Pandit became CEO of Citi in December 2007.



32.Haim Saban



Saban Capital Group chairman and CEO
Born: 1944, Egypt
Now lives in U.S.

Saban moved from his native Alexandria to Israel when he was 12 and after attending agricultural school and serving in the Israeli army, he moved to France in 1975 and launched a record company. In 1983 he moved once again, this time to the U.S., where he developed a reputation as a premier Hollywood dealmaker thanks to the success of shows like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Saban teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to create Fox Family Worldwide and pocketed $1.6 billion when Walt Disney (DIS) bought it in 2001. Since then, he and investors have bought control of Univision Communications and Bezeq, Israel's largest telecom operator.



33.George Soros



Soros Fund Management chairman
Born: 1930, Hungary
Now lives in U.S.

The hedge fund billionaire grew up in Budapest and, after surviving the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II, escaped for the West in 1946. He moved first to Britain, where he worked as a waiter to put himself through the London School of Economics, and then in 1956 to the U.S. He launched what became the Quantum Fund in 1973. In 1993 he founded the Open Society Institute to promote democratic institutions around the world.



34.Howard Stringer



Sony chairman, president, and CEO
Born: 1942, Britain
Now lives in U.S. and Japan

In 2005, what was once unthinkable happened: A gaijin took the helm at Japan's premier electronics company when Stringer took over from Noboyuki Idei and became Sony's (SNE) chairman and CEO. The Welsh-born Stringer moved to the U.S. in 1965 and soon joined the Army and went to fight in Vietnam, winning the Commendation Medal for meritorious achievement. He became a citizen in 1985. Before joining Sony, Stringer worked as a producer at CBS News, where he won nine Emmy Awards, and later ran the network.



35.Lip-Bu Tan



Walden International founder and chairman
Born: 1960, Malaysia
Now lives in U.S.

One of the top venture capitalists bridging Asia and Silicon Valley, Tan founded Walden International in 1987. Today, the San Francisco-based Walden is a $1.9 billion VC fund that has invested in companies such as Chinese-language portal Sina.com (SINA). Tan, who has a master's degree in nuclear engineering from MIT and an MBA from the University of San Francisco, is on the board of Sina as well as Flextronics and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.



36.Harry Triguboff



Meriton chairman
Born: 1933, China
Now lives in Australia

Australian property magnate Triguboff's parents were Russian Jews who fled to northeastern China after the rise of Lenin. Before moving to Australia and launching Meriton, the privately held company that is the premier developer of residential properties in Sydney, he lived in Israel for seven years and is a major supporter of charities in the country.



37.James Wolfensohn



Wolfensohn & Co. chairman
Born: 1933, Australia
Now lives in U.S.

Wolfensohn, who spent a decade as president of the World Bank, is now much sought after as an advisor to governments and companies worldwide. Since leaving the bank in 2005, he has advised on global strategy at Citigroup (C) and given counsel to Beijing's sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corp., and the government of Kazakhstan. The University of Sydney graduate moved to the U.S. in the 1950s to attend Harvard Business School and was general partner at Salomon Smith Barney before launching Wolfensohn & Co. in 1981. After leaving the World Bank, he was special envoy to the Middle East for the Quartet and contributed his own money for Palestinians to purchase Israeli greenhouses left behind after Israel's troops withdrew from the Gaza Strip, but he resigned in April 2006.



38.Jerry Yang



Yahoo co-founder and former CEO
Born: 1968, Taiwan
Now lives in U.S.

Following the death of his father, Yang and his family moved to the U.S. and settled in the Bay Area of California. Yang, who co-founded Yahoo (YHOO) with Stanford classmate David Filo in 1995, is married to a fellow immigrant: Wife Akiko Yamazaki grew up in Costa Rica. He endured a rocky term as CEO from June 2007 to January 2009, when he stepped down and was replaced by Carol Bartz.



39.Allan Zeman



Lan Kwai Fong Holdings chairman
Born: 1949, Germany
Now lives in Hong Kong

For years before Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule in 1997, many local residents worried about the future were keen to get Canadian citizenship as a hedge. Zeman, who was born in Germany but grew up in Montreal, went in the other direction. Having built a fortune as the head of a trading company and developer of Hong Kong's top entertainment district, Zeman renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2008 and became a Chinese citizen.